27.04.2022 Psychology
Fiona Kazarovytska
Time to Let Bygones be Bygones? – The Case of 'Schlussstrich' Mentality in Social Groups with Perpetrator History
Representations of history have crucial functions for communities and help us answer the essential questions of who we are, who our friends and enemies are, and what lessons we have learned for the future. Yet there may be events from the past that communities would prefer to erase from their collective memory. In Germany, for example, the call to end discussion of the National Socialist past (demand for historical closure or ‘Schlussstrich’) is a well-known rhetoric that has appeared regularly in public discourse since 1945. Fiona Kazarovytska seeks to understand what individual, public discourse, and event factors may drive the desire for closure on historical crimes, including the persecution of Jews in Germany and Italy during World War II, crimes against Native Americans in the United States, or the Stolen Generations in Australia.
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04.05.2022 & 11.05.2022 Communication Science
Daniel Stegmann & Christina Viehmann
Polarized by the media? - How traditional and digital media affect societal cohesion
In recent years, many worried that different groups in society increasingly disconnect from one another. Such a growing polarization among society is often accompanied by a critical of even cynical perspective towards the political system and its’ representatives. The culprits for these developments have been identified quickly – digital media environments, particularly social media. We investigate how using different media – be it traditional mass media or social networking sites and alternative media – affect the cohesion in a society. We conceive societal cohesion in a broad sense as a positive or negative orientation towards the fellow citizens, but also as an orientation towards the political institutions as common structures that enable the functioning of the society. To pursue this broad angle we cover two sessions with very different approaches and evidence from various research projects.
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18.05.2022 Political Science
Julian Frinken
Representing “the people” through lottery? Prospects and Pitfalls of Citizens’ Assemblies
The practice of choosing legislators by lot is as old as the Athenian polis. Currently, this idea is gaining new momentum: The Irish Citizens' Assembly and the French Citizens’ Convention for Climate are just two examples of processes in which randomly selected lay citizens are charged with shaping policy. While the German government also intends to make greater use of such participatory processes, some voices even call for them to be given decision-making power. Julian Frinken explores how a shift away from elections to lottery might affect our understanding and the institutionalization of the principle of democratic representation.
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01.06.2022 Psychology
Marius Frenken
Believing in conspiracy theories? How differently people look at happenings in the world
The topic of beliefs in conspiracy theories has attracted public and scientific interest in the past years especially during the pandemic. Psychological research has focused primarily on causes of such beliefs. Why do some people endorse conspiracy theories while others reject them, even when they are exposed to the same information? The talk will concentrate on the general cognitive underpinnings of conspiracy theory beliefs and how people can differ in their informational processing and worldviews.
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08.06.2022 Sociology
Martin Neumann
Old friends killing each other. Simulating the escalation of violence in a criminal group
Martin Neumann presents a simulation model that resulted from a participatory modelling process in collaboration with stakeholders from the police. The model simulates (failed) conflict regulation within a criminal group. The development and analysis of the simulation model are intimately tied to qualitative research. The rules of the model are based on a qualitative analysis of textual data, and the simulation results are traced back to the open coding of the empirical data. The simulation generates narrative counterfactual scenarios. The credibility of the counterfactual scenarios is assessed by a hermeneutic investigation of their meaningfulness. They explore the space of actions in complex and non-transparent situations that are possible from the perspective of the worldview of the criminals. This can be denoted as the cultural horizon. The results provide virtual experience for the stakeholders. While criminal acts are transparent to the police, the motivations for them are not Thus, the theoretical lens for understanding the violence is the dimension of sense making of the social world.
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15.06.2022 Sociology
Tim Sawert
Moving in with Matthias, Burak, Fadi or Mason. Ethnic discrimination in students’ shared housing market
Ethnic discrimination in the labour or commercial housing market is an internationally well-documented phenomenon. One social group that shows particularly positive attitudes towards immigrants in surveys is the group of students, many of whom live in shared flats. Here, in contrast to the commercial housing market, expectations of personal contact can be expected to be a much stronger factor in the selection of flatmates than purely financial considerations. In his talk, Tim Sawert discusses the results of a field experiment conducted in Germany in which ethnic discrimination was investigated in the shared housing markets for students. He shows how popular Fadi, Burak and Mason are compared to Matthias and what factors (e.g., number of people in the shared flat, language) explain discriminatory behaviour.
22.06.2022 Journalism
Fabienne Makhoul
Between intercultural communication and sustainable culinary journalism - a working day at the journalistic department.
Intercultural communication is currently more important than ever. The fact that this should also play a role in university education is something we have taken very much to heart as a guideline for the conceptual design of our double master's programme with France. At the same time, specialised journalism is becoming more and more important, because in the news flood of everyday life, well-researched, critical and targeted information on specific topics is the Ariadne's thread that leads through the complexity of everyday life. But what if journalisms that have a great impact and are directed at an industry that has an influence on issues such as environmental awareness, sustainability and environmental policy goals may not really be fulfilling their journalistic mandate? An insight into the daily work routine between intercultural information and research on culinary journalism, between students, management and doctoral thesis.
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29.06.2022 Sports Science
Christiana Schallhorn
Sports in the media - more than just entertainment
For many fans, watching sports on TV is a popular pastime that allows them to escape the worries of everyday life. Especially during major sporting events such as the Fifa World Cup, sport generates great emotions among fans and provide social cohesion in society. However, sports today are much more than pure entertainment. Increasingly, social, economic and political issues are also becoming part of the reporting, drawing attention to grievances and stimulating critical thinking - even beyond sports.
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06.07.2022 Political Science
Johanna Speyer
Global Brexit - How the world makes sense of Britain‘s exit from the EU
In the morning of 24 June 2016 shock and incredulity were palpable across Europe and around the world. By a narrow majority of 51.89 per cent, the British citizens had voted for their country’s exit from the European Union (EU). The turmoil and uncertainty left by the unexpected referendum result was hardly alleviated by the then UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s enigmatig statement that “Brexit means Brexit”. But how has this decision been perceived around the world and how do the EU's global partners see an EU without the UK? In fact, this international perception is of great importance as it influences the EU's possibilities for and choice of foreign policy. In this presentation, we will investigate how external perceptions and foreign policy relate and discuss, how we can find out about a country's perception of others. Based on these foundations, we will analyse, how strategic partner countries of the EU, and the United States during the Trump administration in particular, perceive the EU after Brexit and which foreign policy they consider towards the EU.
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13.07.2022 Educational Science
Vincent Horn
Loneliness Among Older Refugees in Germany (Please note: This lecture takes place online via MS Teams.)
During the last decade, Germany has been the major destination country for refugees in Europe. Since 2013, more than 1.8 million asylum applications have been filed, most of them from individuals from the Middle East and Africa. Owing to various factors (e.g. loss of family and friends, lack of social networks, language barriers), refugee populations can be seen as particularly vulnerable to social isolation and loneliness. However, rather little is known about the risk and protective factors of loneliness among refugees. This holds especially true for older refugees, who seem to be off the radar of scholars in migration and mental health research as well as of policy makers and practitioners. This paper seeks to narrow this research gap by asking for the prevalence and determinants of loneliness among recently arrived older refugees in Germany. This paper addresses these questions by exploring data from the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees in Germany from 2016 and 2017 (N=1,020), using regression analysis. It is shown, that both individual and societal factors have a bearing on older refugees’ loneliness, indicating the relevance of an integrated theoretical approach to loneliness in the context of forced migration.
20.07.2022 Sports Science
Christian Theis
Working out for Instagram? – Fitness lifestyle among young people
Working out in a gym is part of everyday life among many young people. They are guided by a kind of fitness lifestyle, which is presented e.g. on Instagram. Christian Theis will provide an insight what influence this sports-cultural setting has on the participants: What is supposed to be a beautiful body? What effects of fitness training on everyday life expect young people? And what is actually happening on social media – are they working out for Instagram?
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