Research Collaboration

The study of New Global Dynamics is particularly challenging because, on the one hand, it requires various empirical investigations in fields that have been treated separately in traditional (Western) knowledge systems (such as natural and social sciences) and, on the other hand, it must observe, record, and integrate newly developing theory and methods in these different fields. No single research centre, no matter how large, can study the entirety of New Global Dynamics on its own. For this reason, it is necessary to reach a critical mass comprising the relevant studies to be able to play an authoritative role in a global network that provides the necessary integration for research. The research initiative is striving for precisely this position by building on a wide range of preliminary work carried out at the applicant universities/institutions.

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Profiting greatly from this preliminary work, the research initiative adopts an approach in which four interdisciplinary university centres – the Centre for Interdisciplinary Regional Studies and the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies in Halle and the Research Centre Global Dynamics and the Centre for the Study of France and the Francophone World in Leipzig – have joined forces with seven non-university institutions. With geography, anthropology, global studies, law, history, literature, cultural studies, and area studies acting as the interdisciplinary hinges of this cooperation, this collective approach brings together the diversity of approaches at the applicant universities/institutions. Each of the four university centres organizes its research around specific scopes, which act as the foundations for the cluster’s four research areas. The research undertaken within the cluster is thus based on a long-standing institutionalization of interdisciplinary work. It is only through this shared and nourished institutional setting that the enormous potential of a collaborative research environment be realized, as well as the risks be faced.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To this end, the research initiative will bring under one roof, for the first time, social, environmental, historical, and spatial sciences, facilitating the systematic coordination and dialogue of their approaches to New Global Dynamics. Accordingly, the cluster’s institutional setting and research environment are intimately linked, providing the fundament for and commitment to intellectual innovation.

 

Analysing the transforming and ordering effects of New Global Dynamics holds great potential to go beyond the current state of research and to develop tools that take the dynamics underlying the more recent crises of the 2010s/2020s as empirical starting points while placing these dynamics in a long historical-comparative perspective. The intrinsic complex nature of New Global Dynamics and the related experiences with crisis implies versatile and open-ended solutions. In order to thoroughly examine worlds in crisis, the cluster aims to establish a School for New Global Dynamics that:

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1. forms an interface between the social sciences and humanities, on the one hand, and spatial and environmental sciences, on the other;

2. pursues empirical research on all regions of the world, conceived and carried out with partners in these regions, in order to counter conceptual centrism (known primarily as historically grown Eurocentrism, but by no means limited to Europe), which treats the experience of a single world region as a yardstick for developing and measuring strategies that claim universal application without reflecting on unique circumstances;

3. overcomes the classical globalization paradigm, which has generally addressed global dynamics only separately, by establishing a truly transdisciplinary approach that goes beyond the traditional anthropocentrism found in many social theories;

4. develops a new historiography that takes the currently observed global dynamics as a conceptual point of departure for a critical reinvestigation of the past; and

5. places the connection between global dynamics and regional transformations in Central Germany at the centre of integrated research and public outreach, helping to situate regional structural changes, for example towards decarbonization, into the necessary global context by comparing similar as well as diverse regional developments worldwide.