Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences

Research at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences focuses on the problem of modernity and modernisation. More specifically, this involves issues concerning culture and problems of meaning and interpretation (Sinngebung), discussions on norms and values, and the images and ideas in which these are couched and issues related to the quality of life. Furthermore, attention is devoted to more structural developments in politics and society, including the reconsideration of traditional political concepts and ideas, in part related to new forms of management and governance, and tendencies toward European integration and globalisation. Specific consideration is also given to the problems associated with the knowledge society and innovation: scientific and technological developments (like the new media), their social consequences and the political and ethical decisions that accompany them.

The emphasis on modernity and modernisation implies that the research effort is mainly geared toward Western culture and society of the 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries.

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 program 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 conceptualizing 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.

Programme 2: Science, Technology and Society

This program studies the relations between technology, science and society. The research heuristics comprise a combination of philosophical, historical, sociological and anthropological approaches. The central question is 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 recognized and explicitly studied.

Programme 3: Science and Culture: Texts and Contexts

This research program 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 program 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.

Core themes

The Institute’s research is clustered around five interdisciplinary core themes. These themes go beyond the programmes: researchers from different programmes work together on these core themes:

European governance

The European integration process has spawned new forms of governance that also require new conceptual and theoretical frameworks. The academic debate is currently dominated by the so-called multi-level governance model. This prevailing paradigm is marked, however, by a relative neglect of the cultural dimension of the European integration process – an issue that needs to be critically considered and corrected. In this research project this is done from an interdisciplinary angle, based on a combination of insights from political science, history, legal studies and public administration. This approach also has a comparative dimension, in the sense that the analytical efforts are aimed at a comparison of various countries and policy domains.

Europe and the world

The question ‘What is Europe?’ immediately refers to the relationship between Europe and the non-European world. This relationship is all the more important in an era of globalisation, whereby regions that are far apart become part of networks of worldwide interdependency and are confronted with common problems such as global distribution of wealth and poverty, the environment and migration. This core theme explores the various dimensions of globalization and the specific role of Europe in that process. The research is geared to theory and the analysis of ‘globalisation’ as a phenomenon with the help of sociological and anthropological views. This theoretical approach is combined with the study of relevant historical backgrounds following the so-called world history-approach. This involves the historical construction of ‘Europe’ vis-à-vis other continents and its associated values such as democracy and tolerance, but also the exchange (and clash) of ideas, artifacts and technologies that in a centuries-long and all but one-directional process has led to the current ‘world system’. Finally, these theoretical and historical considerations are linked with the debate about the place Europe has within this world system and, more in particular, to the question to what extent the EU succeeds (and can succeed) in realising its claims on a global stage through its Common Foreign and Security Policy.

The culture of innovation

This project situates the yearning for constant innovation and the creation of a ‘knowledge society’ in a philosophical, historical and sociological perspective. How do highly developed societies renew themselves, and which role is played therein by science and technology? What is the contribution of policymakers and experts and what in fact do they mean by ‘innovation’? How are new ideas and artifacts disseminated across the boundaries of disciplines, companies and countries? But also: where do such efforts fail or meet with resistance, and which social and cultural factors are responsible for that? In addressing these and similar questions, it is important to build on existing theories of science and technology development, as well as on political-philosophical and sociological research of the role of experts in modern society. Attention is thereby devoted in particular to the role of tacit knowledge, networks of expertise, standardization, risk and vulnerability control in innovation, and to the significance of innovation for democracy.

Digital culture

Digital culture proves to be less uniform than theorists anticipated. This research is aimed at the diversity of cultural and social practices in which digitalisation is deployed. The issue is how material realities and virtual worlds construe each other and what the mediating role of technology thereby is. Various levels can be identified, such as: the basic concepts for ordering both spheres (‘network’, ‘database’, ‘navigation’); the aesthetic design (spatial, temporal); the practices of social organisation, evaluation and regulation (online community formation). The research starts from studies of concrete problems and cases in which a theoretical-systematic and cultural-historical frame reinforce each other. The historical axis focuses on a comparison between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media. The systematic axis involves analyses of the mediation of perception, imagination and engagement as shaped in science, art, journalism and entertainment.

Beyond the three cultures

This research theme is geared toward the boundary interactions between the natural sciences and the social sciences on the one hand and the arts/humanities on the other. It involves the following areas of attention: 1. the scientific and artistic co-production of identities, concepts and practices. This may apply to regional identities (cf. the construction of the identity of both Dutch and Belgian Limburg in regional literature, folklore and regional historiography), age-related identities (cf. the construction of the child in both fiction and educational texts), ethnic identities, etc. In the case of concepts this may apply to literary/mythological and natural science meanings of notions such as ‘chaos’ or ‘entropy’. In the case of practices this pertains to, for instance, various experimental practices in science and visual art. 2. the demarcation struggle between the disciplines (including the arts). How do sciences and arts demarcate their identities vis-à-vis each other? How do they articulate their claims to authority in competition with each other? How do these particular demarcations shift in the course of time? 3. the development of symmetric methodologies for research of the various interactions between the three cultures. If studies of the relations between the arts and sciences used to give priority to science, this hierarchy is increasingly challenged. This is why it is important to develop methodological instruments that allow for a genuine dialogue between the sciences and the arts as equal partners. This entails, for example, experiments involving methodological transfer (such as the application of methods originally developed for the study of literary texts to the analysis of scientific publications or the explanation of specific phenomena in poetry with the help of biological theories).

More information can be found in our scientific report.