Crisis and Socio-ecological Transformation

Duration: 10/2021 - 09/2025

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Markus Wissen (IPE/HWR)

Coordinator: Dr. Stefan Schoppengerd (HWR)

Financed by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation

As part of the graduate school managed by the HWR and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, four scholarship holders have been researching "Crisis and Social-Ecological Transformation" since 1^st of October 2021. A further four doctoral scholarships will be awarded in October 2022. The research topics of the first four scholarship holders are climate scepticism and authoritarianism, the socio-ecological downsides of electric car mobility in the global south, gender relations in the climate movement and protests against the extraction of raw materials on the European periphery.

The scholarship holders are supervised by a team of university teachers: Maria Backhouse (Friedrich Schiller University Jena), Sybille Bauriedl (European University Flensburg), Ulrich Brand (University of Vienna), Kristina Dietz (University of Vienna), Dennis Eversberg (Friedrich Schiller University Jena), Christoph Görg (University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences Vienna), Melanie Jaeger-Erben (Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus), Stephan Lessenich (Institute for Social Research at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) and Markus Wissen (IPE/HWR Berlin).

Funded by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation's study programme and institutionally linked to the HWR, the graduate school creates a working context that serves both individual qualification and the joint development of critical knowledge for the necessary socio-ecological transformation.

The work in the graduate school assumes that the causes for the ecological crisis, and for the unequal distribution of its consequences, are found in the structural indifference of capitalist societies towards their own social and ecological conditions of reproduction, as well as in patriarchal and racist relations of power and domination. An essential prerequisite for overcoming the crisis is therefore seen in a social and political democratisation, as well as in the reduction of social inequality. The research group aims to increase empirical knowledge about these connections, to reflect on them theoretically, to identify the potentials and preconditions for successful struggles for a socio-ecological transformation and to provide the knowledge that helps to navigate these struggles