Research Area D: Cultural Dynamics of Cohesion

Shared knowledge, identities, and values are increasingly contested or eroding. Research Area D investigates their role in the formation and disruption of social cohesion.
 

The crises and transformations of our time demonstrate that cultural dynamics are just as crucial to cohesion as economic and political ones. Russia’s war against Ukraine, for example, is not solely a geopolitical conflict but also a battle over worldviews, ideas, and narratives.

In the present moment of crisis, it is not only material resources that appear scarce. Intangible goods – such as recognition, visibility, trust, hope, and belief in the future – are increasingly perceived as limited. Competition over values, identities, and worldviews is intensifying. The collective devaluation of groups imagined as “the other” is gaining significance. At the same time, this symbolic scarcity, along with distributional conflicts and exclusion, is countered by inclusive, diversity-oriented forms and ideas of cohesion.

Research Area D proceeds from the assumption that meanings, symbols, and narratives provide the frameworks for understanding the world, constructing identities, and regulating interaction. In this way, they contribute to holding individuals together in groups, milieus, and societies.

Guiding Questions of the Research Area

We explore the role of symbolic and cultural constructions in the struggle over knowledge, ideas, values, and identities. We assume that understandings of the world, of others, and of oneself can only be fully grasped by considering both their historical development and their global interconnectedness and pluralism.

Conceptions of social cohesion – and the practices through which cohesion is enacted – vary across societies and in international comparison.

Our research is shaped by three guiding questions:

  • What role do worldviews and understandings of self and others play in the social construction of cohesion across groups, milieus, and societies?

  • How are conflicts over meaning and interpretation conducted? How does competition over symbolic and material goods unfold?

  • How do inclusive and cooperative visions and practices of cohesion succeed?

Focal Areas of the Research Area

This area investigates how young people come to understand the world, develop political awareness, and form identities.

Associated work package:

D_04 Youth as a generation of crisis? Socialization in conflict and transformation

 

Our third focus explores the role of media transformation in shaping worldviews and understandings of the self.

Associated work packages:

D_06 Transformation of the societal order of deliberation

D_07 Prototypes of social cohesion

 

Knowledge Transfer in the Research Area

Research Area D pursues an intensive exchange with practitioners:

  • We produce guidelines for civic education and for youth and cultural policy.
  • We prepare our findings for dissemination via editorial and social media.
  • We cooperate with actors at the intersection of politics and (digital) technology.
  • We also establish dialogical formats that connect research and society. 

Target audiences include especially minoritized or seldom-heard groups. We not only study youth participation and inclusion academically – we actively foster it through transfer activities that engage researchers and young people in joint dialogue.

Research Area Coordinator