Further million-euro funding for Research Training Group
2020-11-11 Lüneburg. The"Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft" (DFG) will continue to support the Research Training Group "Cultures of Critique: Form, Media, Effects" at Leuphana University of Lüneburg with a further 4 million euros over the next four and a half years. This has now been announced by Germany's most important organization for research funding. Established in 2016, the Research Training Group will examine the connection between critique and culture in the history of modernity and the present on the basis of concrete cases of art, media and social criticism. The aim is to reappraise this connection and develop an updated, cultural studies-based understanding of critique.
"Critique is regarded as a foundation of democratic societies, since it serves both individual and collective self-understanding. The assumptions about critique rooted in the Enlightenment are challenged by processes of globalization as well as by new technologies and distribution channels. How the understanding of critique changes when critical practices and concepts are examined under the conditions of globality, and what role the forms and media of critique play in this process, is the expanded question of the second funding phase of the research training group", says Beate Söntgen, professor of art history at Leuphana and spokeswoman of the research training group, describing the orientation of the interdisciplinary project. The participants are art studies, media studies, sociology, philosophy, literature and the history of knowledge.
The DFG Research Training Group is located at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Leuphana. In the group, 10 scientists and 14 junior researchers work together in the second generation. Thanks to the new funding, 12 additional positions for young researchers will be created in the coming years. The qualification concept combines the structure of a Research Training Group with the semi-structured doctoral studies of Leuphana in basic and research training groups. Conferences and workshops serve the purpose of international networking, writing workshops the promotion of professional skills. The project sees itself as an academic working group of experienced and young scientists.
Research Training Groups funded by the DFG are among the most renowned doctoral formats in Germany. Established in 1990 on the recommendation of the German Council of Science and Humanities, they stand for the structured promotion of young researchers in Germany. The DFG currently funds a total of 221 Research Training Groups. In order to receive funding, universities must go through a complex and multi-stage selection process.
Further information on the Research Training Group "Cultures of Critique" can be found here: www.leuphana.de/dfg-programme/kdk.html