Press Release: Approval of the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies

4 July 2018

Photo: Anna Jiménez Calaf on Unsplash

The new Centre for Advanced Studies will look at how modern societies change when they follow different sustainability goals.

The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) has granted funding for a new Centre for Advanced Study at Universität Hamburg entitled The Futures of Sustainability: Modernization, Transformation, Control. Researchers want to understand how modern societies change when they follow different sustainability goals. Sociologists Prof. Dr. Frank Adloff and Prof. Dr. Signhard Neckel from Universität Hamburg submitted the grant application. The Centre will initially receive funding to the tune of €3.4 million over 4 years. It will also enjoy a program allowance of 22% of the overall grant sum. The Centre is scheduled to begin its work in 2019. It is the third Centre for Advanced Studies at Universität Hamburg.

In the past 20 years, sustainability has become a key principle in social change, according to the Centre’s spokesperson Prof. Neckel. However, the term “sustainability” involves very different goals and ideas about the future. The Center will look closely at three different paths that sustainability has taken so far: modernization, transformation, and control. They reveal the visions of the future that are currently subject to debate: Viewing sustainability as modernization means using sustainability as a means of renewing a capitalist economy and adapting it to different conditions, says Prof. Neckel. Critics fear that forced economic growth hinders sustainable development and call for a fundamental social transformation. A contrasting approach is to address sustainability with comprehensive policies of control.

The president of Universität Hamburg, Univ.-Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Dieter Lenzen, congratulated the researchers. “Our colleagues’ success is also attributable to our appointment policies: We appointed an entire cluster of professors working on social issues related to sustainability at the same time. Our success is the result of this cluster. Congratulations!”

With its questions about sustainability, the Centre is exploring terra incognita. Sustainability research has grown in many different directions, “but the problems that sustainability itself might cause have received little attention from researchers so far,” explains Prof. Adloff. There has also been little research on what new types of conflicts, inequalities, and hierarchies might arise when the social criteria for sustainability find their way into jobs, institutions, and cultural values.

To avoid a Eurocentric point of view, the Center will also look at sustainability discourse in Latin America, East Asia, and Australia. In the upcoming years, 40 international researchers will come to Hamburg as fellows.

DFG Centres for Advanced Studies are instruments designed specially to fund work in the humanities and social sciences. They enable researchers to work on pressing and very broad topics. They also place special value on cooperation between renowned researchers.

Press Release by UHH (pdf, in German)

Press Release by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG)