Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences

Research in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences focuses on problems of the modern, highly complex society from an interdisciplinary and internatiional perspective.

Programmes

The Faculty's research is orgnaised within the Research Institute for Arts and Social Sciences. The Institute consists of three research programmes. These programmes organise seminars and workshops on a regular basis and stimulate collaboration between researchers within the Institute.

Programme 1: Politics and Culture in Europe

The perspective of this programme is determined by a combination of political science and cultural history. The research focuses in particular on the problem of European integration, both the institutional and cultural aspects of this process. Rather than conceptualising Europe as a given configuration that coincides with the European Union, the basic tenet is that each debate on Europe as a political unit requires closer reflection on European culture and its values, traditions and internal diversity. The programme Politics and Culture in Europe hosts the focal point Administrative Governance.

Programme 2: Science, Technology and Society (STS), including Globalization and Development issues>

In addition to studying relations between technology, science and society, this programme pays specific attention to issues of globalization and development. The research heuristics comprise a combination of philosophical, historical, sociological and anthropological approaches. Two central questions are addressed. The first concerns how modern societies are constituted by science and technology, and how, vice versa, social and cultural conditions shape technological and scientific developments. The research focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries, with explicit attention for the historical roots in the 17th-19th centuries. The central tenet is that science (including the humanities and social sciences) and technology (in its material forms and as a discipline) are such pervasive constituents of highly developed societies that our modern culture can only be understood when these key roles are recognised and explicitly studied. The second central question addressed by the programme is how transnational connections between disparate areas of the globe brought about by globalization and migration trends, give rise to new dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, new cultural configurations, transnational social and political formations and processes of economic structuring and restructuring. Research on this question is characterized by a transnational perspective where linkages between the Global North and South or within the Global South are the focus. This programme hosts the focal point STS.

Programme 3: Science and Culture: Texts and Contexts

This research programme explores the field of tension between knowledge, imagination and mediation, or, to put it differently, between sciences and arts, technologies and media. Scientific theories as well as imaginative pers¬pectives have to be embodied in words, pictures, material artifacts and social institutions in order to come across. These visual, verbal, technological and institutional mediations create a common ground between sciences and arts, facilitating different types of interaction between the two domains. This research programme focuses on the points of intersection between sciences, arts, technologies, and media, including the political dimensions of the different ways in which they implicate each other. 'Sciences' include both the natural and the social sciences, the arts both literature and the visual arts. The programme Scinece and Culture hosts the focal point Cultural Memory and Diversity.

More information can be found in our scientific report