Newsroom

Hostility towards democracy is on the rise in Germany. Yet politicians and academics pay little attention to the attitudes of a particularly important group: young voters. An interdisciplinary project in eastern Germany is determined to change that.

A small, rich minority is becoming increasingly wealthy. Eva Wegner and Miquel Pellicer ask: How does politics contribute to growing economic inequality – and whose interests do MPs actually represent?

How do democracies change in the face of global challenges? And what can science contribute to their resilience? Researchers and stakeholders outside of academia are to develop answers in cooperation projects funded by the Volkswagen Foundation for up to five years. Nora Kottmann and Cora Schaffert-Ziegenbalg present the programme.

The programme addresses persons from science together with actors outside of academia who are interested in transdisciplinary research and aim at jointly developing new perspectives on democratic forms of government under change.

The growing influence of anti-pluralist parties is often accompanied by a decline in academic freedom in the respective country. This is one of the findings of the latest Academic Freedom Index (AFI). It covers 179 countries worldwide.

Rhetoric expert Anika Kaiser researches how people can make themselves heard on the major issues of our time – artificial intelligence (AI) being a case in point. She is the right person to take care that this grassroots democratic process does not remain too detached from reality: in her first life, she trained as a painter.