Institutions

The idea behind the Käte Hamburger Collegia is to demonstrate the attraction of German work in the humanities, cultural and social sciences and to stimulate internal structural changes in the German research world. Goethe.de spoke with Dirk Messner, one of three Directors of the recently founded Käte Hamburger Collegium for Political Cultures of World Society, about the new research network and its practice of global cooperation.

Professor Messner, what does the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) expect from international research institutions in the humanities such as the Käte Hamburger Collegia, which were launched in 2007?

The Ministry wants the Käte Hamburger Collegia to contribute to strengthening the excellence of German research in the humanities and social science in the relevant fields. It’s about international networking and the international visibility of the collegia – and so of German research in the humanities.

In addition, the project supports integrated research approaches that focus on more than merely partial aspects of complex problems. The goal is to gain internationally prominent scholars to join in the work of the collegia and to acquaint highly qualified post docs with the forefront of research.

The collegium for Political Cultures of World Society, which you head with two other directors and which begins its work at the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2012, goes back to an initiative of the Cultural Studies Institute (KWI) in Essen. How did that come about, and who is participating in the project?

The initiative came from the Director of the KWI, Professor Claus Leggewie, with whom I work closely as a member of the German Advisory Council on Global Environmental Change on questions of global cooperation.

Also on board is Professor Tobias Debiel, Director of the Institute for Development and Peace (INEF) in Duisburg, because he has interesting expertise to contribute from Peace and Conflict Studies.

Three key concerns

What are your concerns?

There are three key concerns that we’ll discuss at the Collegium.

First, for some time now tectonic shifts of power have been taking place in the world economy and world politics. Countries like China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa are gaining in importance. Our research networks, however, are still strongly influenced by their trans-Atlantic past and Western world views. At the Collegium we’ll work together especially with scholars, scientists and people involved practically in international politics from these emerging countries so as better to understand the present and shape the future.

Second, there is a consensus that in future we must reach a significantly higher level of international cooperation in order to tackle world problems. This applies to climate change, the necessity of a global turn in energy policy, the stabilization of international finance market and fragile states, and the re-invention of democracy under global conditions. We want to look at the most successful patterns of global cooperation and to learn from them. We’ll examine precisely those cooperative successes that no one thought possible before – in economics, in politics, in science, scholarship and culture.

Third, our method of working will be radically interdisciplinary so as to create the knowledge we need for the global cooperation of tomorrow. Usually, “global governance” is studied by political scientists and economists. We intend to collaborate also with cultural scientists, the cognitive and neuro-sciences, evolutionary anthropology and psychology and innovation theorists in order to find out the secrets of cooperation.

“A lot of synergy potential”

Does this collegial cooperation reflect at the same time a conceptual share-out of tasks?

Claus Leggewie and the KWI stand for cultural studies and have a good deal of experience in interdisciplinary research. With his INEF, Tobias Debiel contributes the perspective of political science and know-how about the connection between development and peace.

At my Institute we work on questions of global development and international cooperation from the point of view of economics and the social sciences, often in collaboration with colleagues from emerging countries. We see here a lot of synergy potential.

Käthe Hamburger as guiding figure

How many of these collegia are planned nationwide, how many have already been established, and how does this new collegium differ from the others in structure, objectives and work?

Planned are twelve collegia. An international panel of experts recommended ours as the tenth of these. All the collegia work on an interdisciplinary model, are strongly networked internationally and focused on different subjects: others, for instance, study legal cultures, the history of religion, cultural technology research, theater cultures, morphomes of cultural knowledge and media philosophy.

Does the name of Käte Hamburger have any programmatic significance for the collegia named after her and possibly for you personally?

Käte Hamburger was the first woman to qualify as a professor for German literature. She was persecuted under the Nazis. She studied the relation of literature to ethics, philosophy and new media and saw herself as a humanist and proponent of the Enlightenment. Her broad horizon, her unfettered thinking and her Enlightenment heritage have programmatic importance for all the Käte Hamburger Collegia.