Project Work

Humans are a hyper-cooperative species: in societies all over the world individuals critically depend on one another for their everyday survival. But the same is true for bees, ants and other animals. What distinguishes human cooperation from that of other animals? What allows humans to think and act together? How did cooperation shape our mind? Together, we want to delve into the bright promises – but also the potential pitfalls of human cooperation.

Academic: Ulf Hahnel

This project examines how academic research can be used to understand and address the tragedy of the commons for specific, self-identified, examples. Commons are shared resources that anyone can access but that risk depletion through overuse, and they occur around the world in contexts such as climate change, fisheries, or land use. Attention is given to how research can clarify the dynamics that create commons dilemmas, explain the conditions under which cooperation emerges or breaks down, and innovative ways to mitigate commons dilemmas. 

Academic: Birte Siem

Allyship is often defined as a process through which individuals from socially privileged groups actively support, advocate for, and cooperate with marginalized groups to challenge systems of inequality and promote social change. However, the ways in which privileged group members engage as allies do not always translate into genuine, equitable cooperation that has the potential to foster social change. Often, allyship manifests in superficial, low-cost actions that actually maintain the status quo (e.g., sharing hashtags like #MeToo to signal solidarity, while abstaining from sustained advocacy and support for the affected groups). Such acts are frequently criticized as performative allyship — symbolic gestures of solidarity that lack substantive impact on structural inequalities. This project investigates the conditions under which allyship can move beyond performative gestures to foster equitable cross-group cooperation between members of privileged and marginalized groups, with the potential to drive substantive social change. In doing so, we draw on examples from various social movements, such as racial justice, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ rights, to illustrate different manifestations of allyship in practice.

Academic: Lars Alberth

Although cooperation can be viewed as several people working towards a shared goal, one has to take ramifications and conditions of such collective action into account. Participants may have distinct, diverging or even conflictive interests, which lead their engagement. Similarly, the formal or informal hierarchies and division of labor may cause dissent. Like any work, cooperation comes with a guarantueed „social drama“, that results from the  respective expectations and needs, and sense of urgency experienced by the people involved. Although one might be inclined to see such „social drama of cooperation“ as a deviation from ist ideal, it is proposed to see such drama as a inevitable and regular occurence which can help us to analyze and mitigate structural issues typical of cooperation.

Academic: Claire Grauer

Cooperation is everywhere around us. There are the more obvious cases, but there is a lot more if you take some time to take a closer look beneath the surface. Where do people of different ages, professions, or social strata cooperate in their everyday lives and communities? Let’s take a closer look at playgrounds, construction sites, sports clubs, or graveyards. With this project we want to explore what cooperation in every-day life means by studying this with the method of ethnography. This is a scientific approach of understanding your environment through close observation, participant observation, and arrive at a „thick description“ of your area of study. 

Academic: Johannes Lohse

Humans are a species of super cooperators and yet when it comes to global cooperation challenges, we seem to be making little to progress. This project group will explore one of the most critical questions of our time: is humanity capable of the cooperation required to solve the climate crisis? We will use the challenges and solutions presented in the video " Climate Change Diplomacy: a most dangerous game!" as a starting point to analyze the complex interplay between technology, policy, and international relations. The group will dissect the main barriers to global action, from economic interests to political gridlock, while also investigating the powerful levers for change that already exist. Our goal is to move use the tools of game theory and behavioural economics to understand why individual action on climate change is insufficient and climate diplomacy is.

Academic: Nike Hornbostel

Mycelium, the vast underground network of fungi, shows us that connection and cooperation can create thriving, resilient systems. In this project, we take inspiration from these natural networks to explore how collaboration works — in ecosystems, in businesses, and in scientific research. You will investigate the science of mycelium, practice teamwork skills, and apply cooperative thinking to real-world challenges. Along the way, you’ll gain essential tools for working in academia: researching, analyzing, and presenting your findings. By the end, you’ll understand how the principles of nature can shape innovative and sustainable solutions for the future.

The cooperation between humans and machines is fundamentally reshaping society, offering both remarkable opportunities and complex challenges. This can be seen as a partnership that enhances human capabilities by improving efficiency, fostering innovation, and enabling greater accessibility, particularly through assistive technologies. However, it also raises critical ethical concerns about autonomy, accountability, and unintended consequences, as well as legal questions regarding responsibility and regulation. Socially, the integration of machines into daily life and the workforce can lead to displacement and structural change, demanding proactive adaptation and inclusive policies. While artificial intelligence plays a key role, the broader human-machine dynamic deserves careful, interdisciplinary consideration to ensure that technological progress aligns with human values and societal well-being.

Academic: Kai Moltzen

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) like Large Language Models (LLMs) have been recently incorporated with various tools and provided within interfaces for humans to interact with. Probably every one of you has already interacted with such AI assistants, like ChatGPT or Claude, to name only two, to solve diverse tasks. But what are the effects of using the help of such AI assistants? In this project, we want to dive into cognitive effects, future possibilities, and pressing risks to shape our responsible usage and development of AI assistants.

Academic: Martin Kohler

Digital transformations have created a sparkling world full of sensors and actors run by enourmous unvisible and spaceless computing power. Working with tools becomes communicating with machines. Smartphone at hand the world around us becomes extensions of our bodies, but also the chattering world of non-human actors. What do they know? How can they know? And what is the base of their cooperation? Among them and us?

Academic: Aida Usmanova

With the rapid development of AI in many fields, its application in nature is gaining more interest. AI is used to track biodiversity in forests and underwater. It is also applied in predicting the quality of water and deforestation. Furthermore, there exist models that aim to decipher animal language. What potential collaborations could you imagine AI and nature would have in the near future? How likely is AI integration to revolutionize the way we perceive and understand animals? 

Academic: Stefanie Habersang

We live and work inside systems that track, predict, and influence our behavior—what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. But what if we could cooperate to resist? This project explores how people—from tech workers to activists, from users to entrepreneurs—can come together to challenge these systems and imagine alternative digital futures. Students will explore (1) How cooperation can create resistance from inside (e.g. open-source communities, ethical tech teams, platform cooperatives, responsible entrepreneurship) (2) How people can use existing tools in unexpected or subversive ways (3) What it means to innovate critically in a system that shapes how we think, connect, and act. The goal of this project is to understand how responsible innovation is possible even when we are deeply embedded in systems of control—and to ask what better systems might look like.

Academic: Frederic Penz & Charlotte von Wulffen

Although there is wide recognition of the importance of entrepreneurship for addressing societal grand challenges, entrepreneurial activities alone rarely achieve positive societal change without the engagement of communities. In this project group we discuss how different types of communities —communities of place, identity, fate, interest, and practice— are involved in and drive the collective creation of positive societal change through entrepreneurship. 

Academic: Britta Werksnis & Saskia Sterzl

Students will explore how games can create meaningful connections and communities that extend beyond the play experience. Based on theoretical foundations from game-based learning, they will design game concepts that bring people together - whether across generations, cultures, or disciplines. The project combines academic analysis with creative design, resulting in a written reflection and video pitch. This hands-on approach demonstrates how playful experiences can foster lasting social bonds and collaborative learning.

Academic: Rebecca Kandut

This project group will analyze food systems to evaluate their impact on biodiversity loss. Students will identify key areas of food waste across the supply chain such as contributions from households or food services or high impact products like pork and beef. The project will explore how improved cooperation and technological innovations can minimize food waste and foster nature-positive food systems.

Scientific progress has always depended on cooperation—between researchers, institutions, and across generations. At the heart of this collaboration lie epistemic virtues such as trust, intellectual humility, and the willingness to share knowledge. At the same time, there is growing competitive pressure within academia—driven by funding structures, publication metrics, and institutional rankings—which poses a potential challenge to collaborative practices. This thematic focus seeks to explore how cooperation in the sciences has developed historically, how it is shaped by institutional conditions, and how it might be sustained or renewed in the face of current tensions. The goal is to better understand what makes cooperation in knowledge production possible—and where its limits lie.

Academic: Leon Ziemer

The remnants of past cultures can be found in all parts of the world. For the European states, elements from Greek and Roman culture were particularly formative. Over the past few hundred years¬, objects from these cultures found their way to the great museums of European countries – and are still displayed there today. State and private collections house large parts of ancient antiques. And the art market is flourishing as a safe market for financial investments. In order to meet the demand, an entire area of organized crime has developed around it, which deals with the procurement of antique objects for the art trade. This project is intended to look at the topic from three very different perspectives in dealing with the historical objects and to show the dependencies of the¬ interdisciplinary approaches. In doing so, the participants slip into the different roles of individual¬ actors and are expected to recognize the problems of the other areas from the respective perspectives.

Academic: Ilsemargret Luttmann

Knowledge production on Africa is dominated by Western academia and framed by Western theories, categories and values, whereas African or local knowledge systems have been ignored, excluded and depreciated. Decolonial thinkers qualify this dominance as epistemological injustice or epistemological violence resulting from colonial structures of power. They challenge the claims of methodological and theoretical universalisms and call for more diverse and inclusive perspectives. This includes recognizing and valuing indigenous knowledge systems and promoting African-led research. In our project group we will have a a deeper look into this debate on decolonising research on Africa.

Academic: Alice Bertram

Time is not just something we measure—it is a powerful perspective for uncovering social (in)justice. While every person has the same twenty‑four hours a day, the actual availability of time for reflection, participation, and growth depends heavily on how societies cooperate: from how we organize mobility and public services to how communities share responsibilities and support one another, for example in childcare or education. Seen this way, time becomes a collective resource whose distribution is deeply political. By making time a focus of cooperative planning—such as in emerging concepts like the 15‑Minute City—we can unlock new possibilities for more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable ways of living together.

Academic: Veronica Bremer

Street art transforms our cities into collaborative canvases where artists, communities, and passersby work together to tell stories that challenge dominant narratives and reclaim public space. In this project group, we'll explore how graffiti, murals, and installations emerge as collective storytelling, where individual artists respond to community voices, social issues, and the stories already written on urban walls. Using our campus and the city of Lüneburg as our living laboratory, we'll examine whose stories get told through street art and how communities participate in shaping these narratives. Students will discover that every piece of street art is part of an ongoing conversation between creators, communities, and the city itself.

Academic: Andrew Brogan

In Educational Communities: Cooperative Relationships in Education we explore the importance of cooperating in educational spaces. In an educational system, and society at large, which increasingly pushes us to think and act as isolated individuals, emphasising the role of educational communities is a radical and powerful response. Through this topic we explore what we mean by community, why cooperative relations in education are so central to learning, and how we can build enduring educational communities in our degree programmes.

Academics: Liselotte Hermes da Fonseca

I google, I phone, I know, I / eye see me in my self-I-es. ‚I‘ seems to determine the world of communication: I have the whole world in my hand and if the mobile phone should be gone, my whole life seems to be lost. I control more and more directly from my hand – intuitively, in a simple and immediate way; I communicate, I know. In the boundless world of networking, in which everything seems to be connected, ‚I my self(ies)‘ stands out as a focus. But where is this ‚I‘ when it sees itself in the hand, in the mirror of the ‚world wide web‘? Who reflects us when we look into this network, from which algorithms and AIs (which are supposed to become increasingly similar to us, increasingly ‚human‘ through our ‚information‘) select specific content for us, from which we in turn (have to) intuitively choose the right ones? By looking into the net, we tell about ourselves and the net tells us who we are - true I-Phones. 1984 was heralded as the year of total surveillance (Big Brother is watching you) but at the same time also as the year of total liberation through computers. Now the concentrates of these computers, the I-Phones in our hands raise questions about the relationship between surveillance, liberation, knowledge, democracy and community. Questions about what I know when I see myself reflected in them and what form of knowledge we get, what this knowledge means for us, for the community and for the world. - What would happen if these ‚mirrors‘ of our knowledge were to fall out of our hands?

In an era where global and domestic politics are becoming increasingly polarized—fracturing societies across both emerging and long-established democracies—the question of how to build bridges across divides is becoming more important than ever. While the international system has long relied on alliances to address issues of international peace and security, such as military invasions, the proliferation of weapons, and democratic backsliding, we are now witnessing a profound weakening of multilateral responses in general, and of the Western liberal order in particular. In this thematic focus on “Forging Alliances: Cooperation Across Borders and Communities”, we will explore current challenges to (international) alliances and cooperation. We will discuss how alliances can still be formed and sustained—not only at the state level, but also through civil society efforts at the local level. The discussion will examine how, even amid deepening polarization, alliances and partnerships can be cultivated to navigate today’s international and national political landscapes. 

Academic: Lukas Hakelberg

Governments lose hundreds of billions of dollars annually to tax evasion by wealthy individuals and tax avoidance by multinational corporations. This money is missing for public investments in education, infrastructure, and the green transition – to name but a few. The ability of the richest to accumulate capital untaxed while middle and low income earners largely abide by their fiscal obligations also exacerbates wealth inequality, which in turn threatens democracy, slows economic growth, and undermines efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. Because of this, governments have over the past decade introduced countermeasures that would have seemed unimaginable even 20 years ago: They adopted the automatic exchange of information on foreign bank accounts, obliged multinational cooperations to disclose information on financial flows on a country-by-country basis, and agreed a global minimum tax of 15 percent on corporate profits to limit profit-shifting to tax havens. Despite substantial progress, however, global tax cooperation is far from perfect. The preferences of countries from the Global South are often ignored and the Trump administration threatens to undo many of the measures previous US governments had agreed to. Hence, project groups investigate how global tax cooperation can be made more equitable and resilient to hegemonic hypocrisy.  

Academic: Franca Bülow

This interactive workshop invites students to imagine possible futures in which communities respond to climate impacts through cooperation, care, and creativity. Drawing on speculative storytelling, real-world case studies, and collaborative mapping using dynamic adaptive (policy) pathways, students explore how adaptation is not just about technical fixes, but about relationships, values, and the power to envision change. Together, participants will rehearse what resilient cooperation looks like: across identities, across sectors, and across time.

Academic: Daniel Eckert

Collaborative local governance emphasizes the joint efforts of politics, administration and civil society in tackling complex issues like sustainability at the local level. By engaging in co-creation processes, these diverse stakeholders work together to develop innovative, inclusive, and actionable solutions. However, major challenges such as meaningfully engaging civil society, complex bureaucracy and power imbalances may arise. Drawing on concrete examples of collaborative governance modes, we will discuss public-private collaborations in the local sustainability transformation from a critical perspective.

Academic: Natascha Zaun

This workshop will put students in the position of EU policymakers taking decisions and adopting EU legislation on a given topic. To this end, students will be divided into three groups (European Commission, Council of the EU and European Parliament). Those in the European Parliament will be assigned to different European Party Groups and in the Council, we will have representatives of different EU member states. The simulation will start with the European Commission submitting a legislative proposal which is then discussed and negotiated both in the European Parliament and the Council. After that, a representative each of the Council, the Commission and the Parliament will meet and negotiate the envisaged legislation in trialogues. If Council and Parliament can agree on a joint position, they will adopt the legislation. The simulation will make students aware of the intricacies of negotiation in international fora, here especially the EU. It will sensitise them of what enables cooperation but also what undermines it and why policies adopted in international fora are often vague and often lack the ambition that some actors would like it to have.

Academic: Tobias Lenz

In the face of multiple crises, international cooperation is as urgent as ever but appears increasingly harder to achieve. From the inside, the rise of nationalist populism in many Western democracies weakens international cooperation because nationalist populists criticize even beneficial cooperation on the grounds that it undermines national sovereignty. From the outside, the growing power of authoritarian states, such as China and Turkey, also weakens international cooperation because these states have more sovereignty-centred and less liberal views of world order. This project examines the pressures that bear on international cooperation in today’s world and the dilemma’s that confront those which view robust international cooperation as necessary to solve many of today’s transnational problems.

Academic: Valentin Schatz

In this project group, we will explore the potentials and limits of international cooperation in addressing environmental challenges of global scale. For this purpose, we will take a look at the work of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, which was established under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). In August 2025, after years of negotiations, the INC did not even get close to agreeing on a global ‘Plastics Treaty’ although plastic pollution is a global problem best addressed through international cooperation. Together, we will explore questions such as: How can we better regulate plastics to tackle the ‘Plastic Pollution Crisis’? What were the reasons for the failure of international cooperation at the INC? What can we learn from this about international environmental regulation more generally?

Academic: Anna Sawallisch

From ancient tribes to online communities, humans have always created institutions to organize life and solve problems. These systems — from governments and laws to informal social rules — help us cooperate, manage conflict, and share power. In political economy, institutions are key to understanding how societies govern themselves. In this group, we’ll explore why institutions emerge, how they work, and what they reveal about inequality today.

Academic: Christine Heybl

Permaculture is a method to observe, analyse, design and implement human spaces with the objective to create longlasting systems where humans interact in a sustainable manner with nature through cooperation. At the opening week the students would get to know the potential of permaculture as a way to reorganise our society. It can be applied in every sector of human existence as well as in the daily life of any kind of community or project, e.g. in an agriculture project, in a garden, a community housing project or to reshape and foster the local economy. The goal is to apply the method as a universal tool to regional circumstances and achieve longterm sustainable systems with functional diversity. Therefore they are robust and they can garantee cooperation at any point.

Academic: Viola Hakkarainen

Today’s crises are crises of disconnection of humans and nature, rooted in the fiction of detached individuals. Yet our lives are sustained by the more-than-human world. Urban environments are often designed from a human-centric perspective, overlooking the interdependence of humans, animals, plants and ecosystems. Through the multispecies justice lens, which emphasizes that humans exist within broader webs of relationships, students will explore how cities might be reimagined to foster relationships across species and to create more just and liveable futures for all.