Announcements for early-career researchers
Social cohesion has many facets. For example, “the Council of Europe defines social cohesion as the ability of a society to ensure the well-being of all its members and to manage differences and divisions by minimising inequalities and avoiding marginalisation, and to ensure the means to achieve the well-being of all.” Social media, among others, play a special role in our society - with both integrating and fragmenting effects that need to be systematically empirically tested.
At the same time, this correlates with questions about individual knowledge and skills, habits, behavioural styles and personality traits, but also about motives, goals and (educational) contexts, which can only be answered through cooperation between economics, sociology, law, psychology, theology, media studies and others.
Annemarie Schimmel’s life and work has built bridges between East and West, between Islam and Christianity and has inspired researchers of religion around the globe. On the occasion of her 100th birthday, the Annemarie Schimmel Fellowship was established to give international PhD students and young scholars the opportunity for a stay at the International Center for Comparative Theology and Social Issues (CTSI) at Bonn University to pursue research in the field of Comparative Theology.
The Fellowship will support the CTSI’s goal of providing a space for exchange and bridge-building between various religious traditions.
A) For PhD students
What we offer
- 4-month research stay at the CTSI from April-July including working space, access to library, participation in events, and the opportunity to discuss your project with international researchers. You can use your stay to develop a full research proposal for a scholarship application or focus on a specific part of your PhD project.
- Participation in the networking activities of the Transdisciplinary Research Area Individuals, Institutions and Societies (TRA 4)
- Travel allowance depending on country of destination
- Financial support for visa and health insurance
- Housing in Bonn
- 600 Euros monthly scholarship to cover your daily expenses
How to apply
The deadline for application is 15 August each year for the Fellowship in the following year. Decisions will be made by the end of September. Please provide
- a 5-page proposal of your research idea in the area of Comparative Theology, including the concrete questions you would like to pursue during your stay in Bonn
Your CV - Contact details of two members of academic staff that would write a letter of recommendation upon our request
B) For Postdocs
What we offer
- 2-month research stay at the CTSI from May-June including working space, access to library, participation in events, and the opportunity to discuss your project with international researchers
- Participation in the networking activities of the Transdisciplinary Research Area Individuals, Institutions and Societies (TRA 4)
- Travel allowance depending on country of destination
- Financial support for visa and health insurance
- Housing in Bonn
- 600 Euros monthly scholarship to cover your daily expenses
How to apply
The deadline for application is 15 August each year for the Fellowship in the following year. Decisions will be made by the end of September. Please provide
- a 5-page proposal of your research idea in the area of Comparative Theology, including the concrete questions you would like to pursue during your stay in Bonn
Your CV - List of publications
Please send all documents combined in one PDF-file to lwiesenh@uni-bonn.de.
Find out more about the CTSI
Find out more about TRA 4
The University of Bonn Transdisciplinary Research Areas (TRAs) aim to jointly support highly innovative, transdisciplinary collaborative research projects from researchers from at least two different TRAs. The funded projects should address new and relevant questions at the interface between disciplines or should aim at the development of new tools, which push the borders of existing research questions.
The innovative and cross-disciplinary nature of the proposal is the most important requirement for funding. A continuation of already established projects will not be funded.
In association with the Udo Keller Stiftung Forum Humanum and the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies (University of Bonn), the International Centre for Philosophy (IZPH) is offering up to 10 Forum Humanum fellowships to qualified doctoral and masters students from any department in the social sciences or humanities at the University of Bonn to participate in an event to be held at the recently founded Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities at the New School for Social Research (NYC).
Researchers within the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies investigate how institutions mediate complex relationships between individuals and society and from there develop a new view of micro-phenomena (development of personality, agency, individualization) as well as macro-phenomena (world society, globalization). Sharing this research objective, the Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities is founded on the premise that genuine knowledge acquisition, truth and objectivity are not the exclusive preserve of any single discipline or method. The concepts we deploy to understand and evaluate human cultural and scientific achievements also have to be placed within their broader social, political and intellectual context and therefore have to be approached from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. The Institute thus aims to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines and draw on the resources of the social sciences, philosophy, and the humanities more generally, in order to pursue a collaborative understanding of the nature and goals of the humanistic and social scientific disciplines and to grapple with the challenges they face in light of the increasing prevalence of intellectual models imported from other disciplines.
Annemarie Schimmel’s life and work has built bridges between East and West, between Islam and Christianity and has inspired researchers of religion around the globe. On the occasion of her 100th birthday, the Annemarie Schimmel Fellowship was established to give international PhD students and young scholars the opportunity for a stay at the International Center for Comparative Theology and Social Issues (CTSI) at Bonn University to pursue research in the field of Comparative Theology.
The Fellowship will support the CTSI’s goal of providing a space for exchange and bridge-building between various religious traditions.
The future is in question and there is an urgent need to act in the face of multiple crises. These socio-ecological emergencies, like the climate crisis or the corona pandemic, happen in a globalised, interconnected world. The questions now are: how do we respond? How do such decisions shape our futures? And in which way do we want these futures to be designed? How can we find shared answers despite a plurality of values around the world? We urgently need to discuss and reflect over the plurality of values and how to decolonise such futures.
In association with the Udo Keller Stiftung Forum Humanum, the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies (University of Bonn) is offering up to 10 Forum Humanum fellowships to qualified doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers from any department in the social sciences or humanities at the University of Bonn to participate in an event to be held at the recently founded Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities at the New School for Social Research (NYC).
In association with the Udo Keller Stiftung Forum Humanum, the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies (University of Bonn) is offering up to 10 Forum Humanum fellowships to qualified doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers from any department in the social sciences or humanities at the University of Bonn to participate in an event to be held at the recently founded Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities at the New School for Social Research (NYC).
Preisgeld: Platz 1: € 1000,- und Plätze 2 und 3: je € 500,-
Teilnahmeberechtigt sind Nachwuchswissenschaftler*innen aller Disziplinen
Jury aus Theologie, Philosophie, Politische Wissenschaft: Kurt Appel, Martín Grassi,
Volker Kronenberg, Cornelia Richter, Jochen Sautermeister
At this conference we will undertake an interdisciplinary reconsideration of privacy, asking how we do want our society to look like based on what we saw, experienced and hopefully learned from the current present and recent past. The concerned disciplines range from different cultural and language studies, law, media studies, philosophy, political theory, psychology, sociology and surveillance studies to computer science and beyond. Contributions from bioethics, health sciences, medicine, etc. or the humanitarian sector are also welcome. The idea is to suggest a Manifesto for the Future of Privacy that can be signed by the participants. An open access publication of the conference papers is planned.
AI-powered recommender systems are now a ubiquitous part of our lives. The next news article we read, movie we watch, song we listen to, product we buy and social media post we see, are most likely recommended to us by an algorithm. Due to their global and fast spread in the last decade, both legal and philosophical research has yet to explore implications that recommender systems have for our lives in a digitalized society. The European Commission, in its Proposal for a Digital Services Act, defines ‘recommender system’ as fully or partially automated system used by an online platform to suggest in its online interface specific information to recipients of the service. Recommender systems determine relevance for users, oftentimes using personal data and profiles to determine the relative relevance of recommended content. The ever-changing technological landscape requires a detailed philosophical and ethical analysis to both evaluate existing legislation and shape future regulatory measures.
The use of recommender systems gives rise to various philosophical questions. How can relevance be defined? Whom are recommendations benefitting? More fundamentally, how should we
understand the concept of a recommendation? This understanding will feed into an ethical framework for recommender systems which mitigates the widespread harms associated with them.
These harms include: exposing children to inappropriate content, personal information being inferred by others who see which items get recommended to a particular user, reducing choices
offered to users, and recommending items in a way that is unfair to particular groups of users. Developing a systematic ethical framework for recommender systems will help those designing them to reduce these harms. The respect of ethical guidelines in the framework at design stage can be part of legal instruments, such as a certification. Other possible legal approaches include sector-specific regulation of recommender systems concerning, for example, news or online marketplaces. Sectorspecific (national) paths to the regulation of recommender systems are to be analyzed in comparison to the proposed EU Digital Services Act, which - in its current version - barely scratches the surface of the regulatory need associated with recommender systems. It limits the regulation of recommendation systems to large online platforms, which then have to provide transparency and choice of options for users.
In association with the Udo Keller Stiftung Forum Humanum, the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies (University of Bonn) is offering 2 further Forum Humanum fellowships, to qualified doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers from any department in the social sciences or humanities at the University of Bonn to participate in an event to be held at the recently founded Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities at the New School for Social Research (NYC).
Researchers within the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies investigate the complex relationships between individuals, institutions and societies. They aim to develop a new perspective on micro-phenomena (e.g. development of personality, competences, individualization) as well as macrophenomena (e.g. world society, globalization). One of many central research goals is to identify key factors that influence social cohesion, equal opportunities, efficiency, resource protection and the development of individual skills in the context of all these factors.
Sharing this research objective, the Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities is founded on the premise that genuine knowledge acquisition, truth and objectivity are not the exclusive preserve of any single discipline or method. The concepts we deploy to understand and evaluate human cultural and scientific achievements also have to be placed within their broader social, political and intellectual context and therefore have to be approached from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. The Institute thus aims to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines and draw on the resources of the social sciences, philosophy, and the humanities more generally, in order to pursue a collaborative understanding of the nature and goals of the humanistic and social scientific disciplines and to grapple with the challenges they face in light of the increasing prevalence of intellectual models imported from other disciplines.
Digital Fragmentations and Digital Sovereignty
In the past years, a growing prominence of the idea of “digital sovereignty” as well as multiple data localization regulations have called the vision of a global, open Internet into question. Data
localization requirements could splinter the current global internet into many regional systems and shape innovation dynamics in a wider variety of data-utilizing sectors. Accordingly, the idea of the fragmentation or Balkanization of the Internet began to play a bigger role in debates on global Internet governance. This debate covers the Internet as an infrastructure as such and increasingly blurs the boundaries between geopolitics, national jurisdictions, and a power struggle for the future of global governance. The resulting discursive and policy fragmentations are likely going to be with us for a long time and many of the underlying tensions could intensify.
Against this background, this project advances theorizations and conceptual understandings of digital sovereignty and fragmentations in cyberspace. To take up the challenge of understanding
the problem of digital fragmentation and its interplay with the notion of “digital sovereignty”, we aim to theorize the degree to which the Internet is becoming or fragmented and the understand
the diver’s modes of fragmentation to which parts of the Internet are subjected, and which actors and processes are driving forces for fragmentation.
Workshop anlässlich der Jahrestagung des Netzwerks Hermeneutik Interpretationstheorie (NHI) in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Bonner Institut für Hermeneutik (ifh) und der Peer Mentoring Group „Systematische Theologie“ des Graduate Campus der Universität Zürich.
In association with the Udo Keller Stiftung Forum Humanum, the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies (University of Bonn) is offering 10 Forum Humanum fellowships, to qualified doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers from any department in the social sciences or humanities at the University of Bonn to participate in an event to be held at the newly founded Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities at the New School for Social Research (NYC).