Focus Groups

Belonging is an increasingly questionable concept in the 21st century, in which human society is becoming more and more global. Societies are becoming more diverse, national allegiances are being challenged by modern labor migration as well as by flight and poverty migration, and traditional ties seem to be generally dissolving. At the same time, a new need for belonging is emerging. Do the phenomena of globalization and belonging contradict each other? Or are we challenged today to rethink belonging at all?

Neighbourhoods are increasingly understood, within many branches of scholarship from urban planning to oral histories and archaeology, as places of global encounters. The cohort of Global Encounters Fellows in 2024 brings together researchers working on research questions from various disciplines on the topic of "neighbourhoods".

The Focus Group Intercultural Studies takes as its starting point the global diversity of intellectual-historical traditions and human understandings of the world and of the self. The research projects aim, on the one hand, to raise awareness of the richness of non-Western ideas and, on the other hand, to develop a fundamental understanding of interculturality and a critical reflection on the European-Western tradition. The focus is on questions of awareness of the coexistence of different cultures in the global world: How can the coexistence of different cultural worlds be thought of without subsuming them under a general form? How can hidden power structures and identity ascriptions be uncovered? What can cultural belonging mean today at all and what influence does globalization have on the cultural belonging of the individual? Do we need to re-evaluate the European-Western history of ideas? How does intercultural encounter change our relationship to nature? And what does it mean for the sciences?

The famous Kantian question "What is man?" can no longer be asked today without grasping man in his situatedness and belonging to the world. It therefore fundamentally concerns human existence as a whole and brings various disciplines into conversation with one another. Above all, however, the question of man always concerns the questioner himself, so that the answers to this question are also historically and culturally situated. Thus, beyond the existential and social dimensions, the question of the human being also gains a global socio-political relevance. We take up these themes ("One World Anthropology", "The Comparative Anthropology of Worlding") in individual events and try to build bridges between different disciplines.

The Focus Group investigates interdisciplinary issues at the interface between neuroscience and the humanities. It explores the relevance of neuroscientific research for the humanities and social sciences - and vice versa. The fact that human behaviour and actions are being increasingly attributed to neuronal processes poses challenges for the humanities and social sciences, whose areas of expertise have so far included such questions, but also offers the opportunity for interdisciplinary research. Crossing disciplinary boundaries opens up unexpected perspectives here, so that subject-specific questions can be given a new perspective and answers can be found together.

The Focus Group aims to promote an exchange between neurosciences and cognitive sciences, psychiatry and the humanities and social sciences such as philosophy and literary studies and thus follows the tradition of the "CIN Dialogues at the Interface of the Neurosciences and the Arts and Humanities" co-organised by the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neurosciences and the College of Fellows. It intends to provide a place for interdisciplinary dialogue and cross-disciplinary collaboration at the University of Tübingen, where internationally renowned neuroscience meets strong humanities and social sciences. It is organising its activities in the summer semester 2024 around the stay and research work of Prof. Vittorio Gallese, who will be visiting Tübingen in the summer semester 2024 as a Humboldt Research Award winner.

The rise of far-right parties, which can be observed in parallel with the global advance of autocratic and authoritarian currents and the rise of the self-proclaimed 'New Right' in Europe, is symptomatic of social division processes that threaten democracy and human rights, social cohesion and intercultural coexistence. 

The College of Fellows, as an institution that promotes academic exchange across borders and global cooperation and is committed to the principles of human rights, the recognition and support for diversity and respectful treatment of one another, is creating a Focus Group dedicated to this topic. The Focus Group is organized in collaboration with the Tübingen Institute for Research on Far Right Extremism (IRex) and the Connecticut / Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium (HRRC), an international, interdisciplinary and inter-institutional platform to promote and support academic collaboration between researchers and research groups at universities and other research institutions in the State of Connecticut and the Land Baden-Württemberg.