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Research at the ScienceCampus

The ScienceCampus is focused on making innovative empirical contributions to knowledge about connections and entanglements of various European regions and the Americas. It also seeks to develop new concepts and approaches for area studies, with a focus on multiscalar area studies. The thematic and theoretical focus of the ScienceCampus emerges from the interdisciplinary research modules and trajectories, outlined below. The aim is to develop academic publications and events, while also translating research into teaching and outreach, both for the public and decision makers in politics, NGOs, business and elsewhere.

Research-led Teaching

One outcome of the ScienceCampus' work since launching in 2019 is the online lecture series European-American Entanglements in the Modern World. This course with the Bavarian Virtual University (vhb) can be accessed from around the world. Each talk by either visiting researchers or colleagues in Regensburg is available in German or English, while the teaching materials, which can be incorporated into blended learning, are currently only available in German. More details about the course can be found on this page. The contributions stemmed from the lecture series (Ringvorlesungen) to which the LSC has contributed, from doctoral projects, and from exchanges with visiting researchers.

Natali Stegmann and her students have contributed to the research agenda on institutions, while also applying transregional and multiscalar approaches, in producing teaching materials on the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

The Master's Prize in area studies, offered jointly with DIMAS, also demonstrates the commitment of the LSC to furthering excellent research at graduate level. Prize winners are given an opportunity to contribute to the Frictions blog-journal.

Supporting Early Career Researchers

Alongside funding for doctoral projects, the ScienceCampus has offered writing-up grants of up to three months. It also supports the internationalization and networking of early career researchers with targeted fundng for attending international conferences. The outgoing fellowship programme is also open to postdoctoral researchers, as well as professors. In the second funding phase, the ScienceCampus will fund two thematic international research networks to be led by postdoctoral researchers in Regensburg in collaboration with colleagues based in Regensburg, Germany and abroad. The call for the first network was launched in July 2024 and can be found here. The deadline for expressions of interest was 15 September and the final deadline is 30 November 2024

Additionally, the LSC invites applications from the research community at UR (only) to apply for funding to attend international conferences. This scheme is also open to doctoral researchers and their applications will receive priority. This year's deadline has passed on 30 September.

 

Interdisciplinary Research Modules & Research Trajectories

The Modules, outlined below, form the core of the research programme at the Leibniz ScienceCampus. They are coordinated by scholars from across different disciplines who specialize in different regions in order to encourage fruitful dialogue and exchange, reflecting the centrality of area studies to "Europe and America in the Modern World". The Research Modules are encouraged to collaborate in organising events, including workshops, conferences and public outreach projects.

The Modules offer a foundation for mentoring the ScienceCampus' doctoral students while developing the comparative and/or transregional aspects of their projects. Members are encouraged to use the Leibniz ScienceCampus Forum on UR GRIPS E-learning platform to exchange ideas, offer support and develop collaboration. They also provide a focal point for visiting researchers to orientate their contributions to the LSC.

In the second phase of the ScienceCampus, starting on 1 October 2024, the Interdisciplinary Research Modules will be complemented and supplemented by Research Trajectories. These expand upon the themes developed in the first phase Modules, while continuing to serve as the thematic focus for the project's activities and outputs.

Research Trajectories ScienceCampus Second Phase (From October 2024)

The researchers involved in the ScienceCampus shape the activities of the research trajectories, contributing their expertise across fields, disciplines and themes.

Globalization's effects on sovereignty have long been viewed in a simplified, unidirectional manner: state sovereignty was to wither as global networks, international institutions, transnational firms or NGOs gained relative power, with interdependence deemed a pacifying force. Not least Russia's invasion of Ukraine has exposed such narratives’ flaws. We explore both the long-term historical and current trajectories of the mutually constitutive nature of security and sovereignty in the multiple Europes and Americas. We trace the erosion and empowerment of sovereignty as entangled on the scales of individuals, societies, state authorities, nations, and empires. The provision of security, we argue, becomes more, not less, demanding under the conditions of networked systemic and great power rivalries. While traditional security concerns, like territorial defense, conventional war and nuclear deterrence, are back on the agenda, hybrid wars and the inexorable securitization of the economy, technology and digitalization demand new answers.

This research trajectory builds on the translational turn to explore processes of knowledge translation, with emphasis on the transfer of norms, institutions, discourses, genres, aesthetic forms, and political configurations. We trace the dynamics of relations between Europe and the Americas in the modern world, their grounding in the colonial period generating complex, multidirectional interconnections still today. Going beyond translations positioned as epistemological and cultural one-way streets, we focus instead on complex forms, contents, interactions, and contestations of cultural transfer. Epistemological emphasis is on the (productive) re-transfer or re-translation of cultural translations into the original (regional) contexts and on post-colonial and post-socialist en-tanglements. Our approach builds on new perspectives in cultural studies that combine area studies and translation studies, bringing them into multidisciplinary dialogue with area studies focused social science and law research.

The spatial dimensions of economic organization are eminent in international economics and economic geography as sources of comparative advantages and uneven economic development. The international economy’s spatiality and issues of interrupted supply chains, fair income distribution, multinational corporations’ responsibilities, and strategic national perspectives in production have gained prominence in public and policy debates owing to the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine. Equally, policy responses to the climate crisis create new entanglements, as evident in the mutual enforcement of industrial policy in the EU and the US triggered by concerns about unfair subsidies on the ‘other’ side of the Atlantic. There is clear need for knowledge on economic and business development, and the economic geography of flows of goods, cap-ital, and services between Europe and the Americas from multiple perspectives: economic, environmental, political, and social.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has produced the largest number of refugees in Europe since World War Two while political repression and economic despair lead to growing numbers of inter-American migration movements. We focus on refugees’ agency in realizing their mobility projects and trying to make new homes in often transitory socio-spatial conditions. Our approach combines explorations on the micro-level of refugees and their communities with broader, macro-explorations of respective past and pre-sent structural conditions, including legal and state contexts or institutional interventions. Viewing the multiple Europes and Americas as a triangular space opens perspectives for tracing multi-directional and highly mobile networks and flows (of people, policies, artefacts, semantics etc.). It generates comparative contexts on how racial hierarchies affect the framing of migration, encouraging critical engagement with the concept of migrants’ (non)whiteness, and on the cultural repertoires and knowledge refugees mobilize to make sense of their migration experience and the multiple spaces they inhabit and transform.

The synergetic AreasLab offers two interlinked reflection spaces for thinking through and working towards Augmented Area Studies.

Reflection Space 1: Augmented Virtual Communication aims to comprehensively integrate digital methods and virtual spaces in multi-audience publications, in teaching, and in participatory, people-centered outreach and research. It will collaborate with the new UR Digital Humanities program, A. Ensslin’s Digital Area Studies Lab at DIMAS, and the IOS electronic research infrastructure led by T. Tegeler. The AreasLab will facilitate alternative forms of knowledge communication, promote academic and non-academic democratic co-creation of knowledge, and stimulate effective communication with users of traditional media, including policymakers and the public.

Reflection Space 2: Augmented Multi-Perspectivity and Self-Reflexivity emphasizes critical self-reflection on limitations of existing knowledge, critically prob-ng our research positions, practices, implied audiences and modes of evaluation (thus seeking “beneficial epistemic friction,” Medina 2013), while addressing practically and critically research ethics, data management and algorithmic bias, epistemic privilege and epistemic asymmetries. It opens area studies to ‘alternative,’ indigenous, peripheral knowledge forms, methods, and materials, giving prominence to neglected epistemologies and emerging empirical realities. This reflection space contributes to the provincialization of (white) Western knowledge (de Sousa Santos 2018; Chakrabarty 2007; Kresse/Sounaye 2022; Ferguson 2019), promoting methodological non-nationalism (Amelina/Faist/Glick Schiller/Nergiz 2012), epistemic diversity, and intersectional approaches. It gives a platform to “knowledge at risk” (Shami 2022) due to war, oppression, exploitation, imprisonment, dictatorship, dislocation, and censorship, thus countering “detrimental epistemic friction” (Medina 2013). Overall, the AreasLab is envisaged as a hub for translating self-reflexive multi-perspectivity and transdisciplinarity into in-person and digital teaching, outreach and transfer work, and multimedia research outputs.

Research Modules ScienceCampus First Phase (Till September 2024)