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).
Zur Schärfung und Weiterentwicklung ihres wissenschaftlichen Profils hat die Universität transdisziplinäre Forschungsbereiche/ Transdisciplinary Research Areas (TRAs) etabliert. Als neuartige, innovationsfördernde Organisationsstrukturen richten die TRAs die universitäre Forschung auf zentrale wissenschaftliche, technologische und gesellschaftliche Zukunftsthemen hin aus. Sie dienen als kreative und explorative Plattformen, auf denen sich Fächer und Fakultäten themenorientiert verbinden und ihre strategische Entwicklung koordinieren.
Innerhalb der TRA 4 – Individuen, Institutionen und Gesellschaften untersuchen Wissenschaftler*innen, wie Institutionen (Markt, Recht, Kultur) komplexe Beziehungen zwischen
Individuen und Gesellschaften bedingen, und entwickeln daraus neue Sichtweisen auf Mikrophänomene (Persönlichkeitsentwicklung, Handlungskompetenzen, Individualisierung) und Makrophänomene (Weltgesellschaft, Globalisierung). Ziel ist es beispielsweise, Schlüsselfaktoren zu identifizieren, die sozialen Zusammenhalt, Chancengleichheit, Effizienz, Ressourcenschutz und die Entwicklung individueller Fähigkeiten im Zusammenspiel all dieser Faktoren beeinflussen.
In diesem Zusammenhang sollen der bereits identifizierte Profilbereich ‚Ethik‘ sowie seine Forschungsinfrastruktur weiter auf- und ausgebaut werden. Die TRA 4 schreibt daher für diesen
Profilbereich gezielt Forschungsmittel mit einer Gesamtsumme von 50.000,- EUR aus, um weitere Vernetzungen innerhalb der TRA sowie Projekte zur interdisziplinären Bearbeitung von ethischen Forschungsfragen anzuregen.
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.
Die Corona-Pandemie stellt uns vor enorme Herausforderungen, nicht nur mit Blick auf unsere Gesundheit und unser Gesundheitssystem, sondern auch in anderen Lebensbereichen wie Politik,
Demokratie, Freiheit, Recht, Kultur, Medien, Wirtschaft, Bildung, Familie und Arbeitsmarkt. Daraus leiten sich neue Forschungsfragen ab. Durch eine Sonderförderlinie für Forschungsfragen mit gesellschafts-, sozial-, rechts-, kultur- oder geisteswissenschaftlichem Fokus rund um die Pandemie möchten wir konkrete Forschungsprojekte vorantreiben. Diese Sonderförderlinie richtet sich an alle Mitglieder der Bonner Universität, insbesondere Wissenschaftler*innen in einem frühen Karrierestadium, und ist ausgerichtet auf Projekte mit einer Laufzeit im Jahr 2022.
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.