FRA_T_01 “Frankfurt is arguing!”

Objectives/ Research Questions

The knowledge transfer strategy of the Frankfurt section is closely linked to the research agenda: “Frankfurt is arguing!” It is explicitly intended to provide space for critical discussions or forms of productive dispute in order to ensure that critical voices are also heard.

This transfer project aims to convey the importance of a conflict culture of productive dispute for social cohesion in three formats and to make it a practical experience: firstly, dispute as a public staging in the “Argument Club” (affection and education), secondly, as a space for experience in the “Argument Bus” (learning to argue, broadening perspectives), and thirdly, dispute as a research perspective on social cohesion in “Controversy: From RISC”.

Three times a year, two contentious personalities plus a moderator and alternating guests meet at the “Argument Club” and discuss controversial topics openly and pointedly that have previously been brought up by citizens. The livestream of the event enables a parallel online discussion, which in turn is moderated by alternating Frankfurt school classes, allowing a culture of debate to develop as a class project.

The “Argument Bus” takes up controversial Frankfurt topics and issues in Frankfurt three times a year, in which members of the section go to different parts of the city in a public bus converted into a bar – for example, in front of community centres, cafés and clubs, in parks, and to shopping centres or sports grounds – and exchange views on these topics in a partially moderated manner while the bar is in operation. The target groups for this are district residents, local multipliers, local political actors, associations and passers-by.

In the classic debate series “Controversy: From RISC”, topics and theses from Frankfurt’s research on cohesion are transformed into controversial positions in three public debates per year, are communicated to a broad academic and non-academic audience, and are open for discussion.

Thematic Reference to Social Cohesion

For social cohesion, it is crucial not to avoid conflicts but to deal with them in a socially productive way. Seen in this light, the current challenges to social cohesion in Germany are less a problem of declining public spirit than the problem of a dwindling conflict culture. By conflict culture, we mean the values, norms, institutions, and practices of political dispute and its containment. It is the specific function of democratic institutions and procedures to ensure that conflicts about the irreducible plurality of modern societies do not lead to processes of fragmentation and disintegration, but are instead turned productively to renew the social foundations of cooperation, such as trust, tolerance, and solidarity. For the Frankfurt research group, plurality and conflict do not contradict a democratic idea of social cohesion, but instead are constitutive of it. “Frankfurt is arguing!” is therefore an invitation and a call to the urban society and beyond to enter into a productive dispute with each other and to experience cohesion in the mode of conflict.

“Frankfurt is arguing!” offers a forum for discussing differences and for spelling out political values and principles that allow people to live together across these differences. The empirical analyses of the Frankfurt research group on the integrative power of democratic institutions and procedures inspire and accompany the transfer project thematically and in terms of personnel.