Research Projects

By highlighting dynamics of change and stability within evolving spaces of climate governance, the project aims to recognize variability as a ‘sui generis’ aspect of climate policy frameworks while aiming at comparability between cases and the evaluation of vectors of stability and change. Empirically, the project compares cases of climate governance in the EU and US as entities associated with conditions of policy-making stability and more disruptive politicization and agenda change.

To what extent can the concept of field and field research, once applied from the natural sciences to social research, be made empirically and theoretically productive as a linking analytical tool between the natural and social sciences? How can the nature/culture dichotomy be overcome in the face of the climate and biodiversity crisis? The DFG-funded project "Experiencing Nature and Society. A Multi-sited Inquiry into Marine and Ethnographic Field Sciences" will investigate these questions during the next three years.

How do ideas about climate change affect policy-making in their function as the foundation for justificatory and advocacy frames in processes on climate change governance? How do ideas and discourse matter for policy in the context of multi-level systems? These and other questions are examined in the DFG funded project by PD Dr. Frank Wendler.

What kind of activities link climate mitigation to urban quality of life? How do we use and (re)shape public spaces for that? And how can urban mobility look like in order to increase climate mitigation and improve the mobility of local residents beyond the car?  The transdisciplinary project Climate-friendly Lokstedt – self-sustaining local transformation processes through real-world laboratories investigates those questions within the city district of Lokstedt in Hamburg. 

Conferences are a central feature of academic life. However, the scientific conference faces new challenges, such as the trend toward digitization in science, the COVID-19 pandemic, and criticism of the climate impact of air travel. Yet conferences are still held in person. Why do academics still travel to professional conferences when virtual alternatives seem so much more convenient, and when air travel has lost some of its former support in both academia and society? The project "Scientific Reputation Revisited: Academic Travel and Conference Interaction" was established as a result of the CSS Working Group "Academic Travel" and takes a sociological perspective on science, focusing on scientific reputation to examine the role that conferences play in the presentation of self in academic life.

The Cluster of Excellence "Climate, Climatic Change, and Society" (CLICCS) aims to understand climate changes, taking into account internal variability, extreme events, and unexpected side effects, addressing the natural and social spheres as well as their interactions. The overarching research question is: Which climate futures are possible and which are plausible?

The Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies "Futures of Sustainability: Modernisation, Transformation, Control", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) deal with the question of how modern societies change when they are guided by different notions of sustainability.