Located on Heussallee, the FIW has been a place for basic research in the social and cultural sciences since 2012. Internationality, an aspect that is now accepted as a given in modern research, is embodied in the very name of the institution. At the FIW, it is already actively embraced in how the forum recruits staff, ensures the continuous involvement of external fellows and accepts doctoral students and guest researchers from all over the world. It also sees itself as an interface between transdisciplinary social sciences and social practice.
“I’m delighted that, over the past 10 years, the forum has grown to become a research institute with a global profile,” says Prof. David Kaldewey, Executive Director of the FIW. “For us, the dimensions of transdisciplinarity and internationality are key components of our research and teaching. After 10 years, we can now look back on a genuine success story in that regard.” One example of this success, he says, is the Rhine Ruhr Center for Science Communication Research, a joint project with TU Dortmund University, the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen and Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, University of Applied Sciences (H-BRS) that secured €3.2 million in funding from the Volkswagen Foundation. Other ongoing third party-funded projects are focusing on democracy and saving lives at sea (Gerda Henkel Foundation), foundations and civil society in political regimes (Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)), daycare centers and gender politics (German Research Foundation (DFG)).
Prof. Rudolf Stichweh, founding director of the forum and current Director of the Department for Comparative Research on Democracies, emphasized that the FIW was established to give Bonn a research institution for the social sciences that would be capable of uniting the skills needed to identify the defining problems of today’s global society with the wealth of theories and conceptual analytics provided by contemporary social science. Combining a proximity to the burning issues, a certain analytical distance and an organized skepticism as a key value of science is both at the heart of the forum’s identity and its ongoing mission, he said. At a time when war, climate change and pandemics all seem to pose an equal threat and in the face of fake news and sociocultural polarization, the cognitive rationality provided by the University has become even more important, he added. A brand of democracy research that tackles the conflict between democracy and authoritarianism in a global comparison is a key factor in his view. By way of a research agenda for the coming decade, Stichweh sketched out the dividing lines that set democracy and authoritarianism apart and along which decisions are made as to how political systems will evolve in one direction or the other.
Alongside the confrontation between democracy and authoritarianism, potential synergy effects for the various institutes, departments and institutions at the University of Bonn were also discussed at the evening event, which touched on the crisis of factuality, the role of national sociology in a global society, and technoculture and mediatization as examples of the problems facing global society. One goal for the future, said Kaldewey, will be to take the transdisciplinary social sciences, some of which are still spread across several institutions, bring them together in a targeted way and raise their profile. As a University of Excellence, it goes without saying that the University of Bonn also needs excellent social sciences, and it was clear that the forum sees itself as a strategic institution in this respect.
You can find out more about the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft at https://www.fiw.uni-bonn.de/en/home?set_language=en.
Media contact:
Forum Internationale Wissenschaft
Doris Westhoff
Management Assistant
+49 228 73-629 82
dwesthof@uni-bonn.de
