Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) in Culture and Society
The Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) at Leuphana University of Lüneburg is a research institute that contributes to the development and internationalization of the university’s main research priorities. Underpinned by an international fellowship program, it addresses the challenges of a globalized present in a research-based manner. Located in the university’s central building designed by Daniel Libeskind, LIAS’s approach is characterized by interdisciplinary collaboration, university engagement, and co-creation.
Culture and Society
During the first five years, research is devoted to promoting diagnostic and critical research in the humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences. Based on the Lüneburg approach, which brings together humanities and social science perspectives, research at LIAS in Culture and Society transcends academic disciplines. As a contribution to the potentialization of society, the institute works to develop new possibilities for shaping the future and expanding our options for thought and action. It therefore also brings to fruition Leuphana University’s declared goal to actively engage with contemporary societal challenges. LIAS in Culture and Society is supported by funds provided by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture and the Volkswagen Foundation through the SPRUNG initiative.
Mission Statement
Programme and Objectives
LIAS in Culture and Society is committed to countering a discourse of no alternatives. Over and above short-term solutions for responding to crises, it strives to open new perspectives and spaces for thought and action. Accordingly, it promotes engaged scholarship so as to uncover, support, and multiply modes of societal potentialization, that is, to interrogate existing certainties and thus activate and engender new possibilities.
Problem Situation and Guiding Principles
LIAS in Culture and Society enquires into the need for new categories, ways of thinking, and methodologies. Without the development of new approaches and modes of thought, so the premise, the future will increasingly be understood solely in terms of a scientific-technical challenge, in the sense of a programmed or a programmable future, while simultaneously no longer being able to address overwhelming cultural and societal challenges. Against this backdrop, the cultural studies at LIAS in Culture and Society, as an interdisciplinary configuration of the humanities and social sciences, strive to systematically reveal what is obscured by techno-scientific operationalities, political-economic rationales, socially dominant patterns of knowledge, and implicit as well as explicit relations of violence. In the context of increasingly disruptive developments in society, the LIAS research programme therefore aims to reformulate research practices in the humanities and social sciences as a “potentialization” or pluralization of the possible that tackles social and cultural questions in nuanced and productive ways through “Critique and Imagination” – one of our mottos. The aim of this approach is always the restoration of society’s capacity to respond. LIAS is aware of the global challenges and manifests its responsibility for cross-border, networked, and multi-perspective thinking in its motto “Co-Existence in a Globalized World”. The “Thinking Across Hemispheres” programme takes into account the impact of interlinked problems in the so-called Global South and North. Hence, what has remained unthought, unarticulated, and unquestioned is revealed.
Research Approach
LIAS in Culture and Society promotes basic research in the humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences at the interface of social diagnosis, critical reflection, and imagination.
LIAS in Culture and Society supports outstanding projects that examine the historical, contemporary, sociocultural, epistemological, political-economic, legal, and technical- scientific conditions of co-existence in a globalized world. It supports research that makes visible multiple forms of articulation and points to contexts that stand for perspectives beyond and outside existing social or political fault lines. With its methodological emphasis on potentialization, LIAS in Culture and Society relies on an ethos of problematization, a critical diagnosis of the present, genealogies of contemporary lines of conflict, methodological openness, and cultural imaginativeness. Empirical methods may be coupled with conceptual and theoretical work, local knowledge with transnational imaginaries. In this regard, a dialogue with researchers from the so-called Global South that provincializes European perspectives contributes to developing research interventions that think across and beyond hemispheres. In particular, emphasis is placed on dialogue with researchers from the Global South, that is, perspectives that European viewpoints tend to view as peripheral.
The institute also actively welcomes non-academic actors in a co-creative approach to collaborative work on potentialization and a targeted expansion of discourse. The aim is to identify relevant voices in research, politics, culture, and business. Public fellows invited by LIAS in Culture and Society provide additional stimuli for co-creative scholarly work and research communication.
This agenda, which also seeks to creatively question and broaden its own scientific approach, incorporates cultural and artistic practices that, with their sensorial-material and intellectual qualities, foster a multiplication of modes of thought, methodologies, and perceptions. To emphasize this focus, LIAS awards an annual Artist Fellowship. Together, the themes “Thinking Across Hemispheres,” “Potentialization,”, “Critique and Imagination”, and “Co-Existence in a Globalized World” form an ambitious and unique resonance chamber and a self-reflective examination of research and academia.
