Käte Hamburger Center "Cultures of Research"

 

The Käte Hamburger Center "Cultures of Research" is an interdisciplinary center funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, which annually appoints ten international fellows from the humanities and social sciences, the natural and technical sciences, and art and art history to Aachen. The collegium sees itself as an international Center for Advanced Studies in the history, philosophy and sociology of science and technology.

The Center's Research Focus

The Center "Cultures of Research" is dedicated to the diverse research cultures of the sciences, their commonalities, differences and transformations.

In an interdisciplinary discourse, the focus is on the questions of how research is changing due to the orientation of the sciences towards complex systems and their societal challenges such as climate change, energy transition, biologization and sustainability, and how the epistemic and participatory complexity of research is increasing as a result.

This change in research is investigated from a historical as well as a contemporary perspective together with international fellows from the humanities, social, natural, life, and technical sciences. The central premise is the philosophy of science, that the complexity requirements and digitalization as an enabler of research into complex systems - simulation, artificial intelligence, machine learning - are currently profoundly changing the forms of knowledge and therefore the insights of research.

As a result, new cultures of transdisciplinary research are emerging and the fields of science and technology are becoming closely intertwined.

The center views itself as a thinking space for the interaction of philosophy of science and technology with science and technology research. The interaction takes place in an exchange with the natural, life, and technical sciences on the subject of the transformation of research.

The Center's Fellow Program

The Center's Fellow Program is announced annually in the fall in open, worldwide calls. Applications are open to postdocs, professors from the humanities and social sciences, the natural and technical sciences, and art and art history with a concrete research project within the framework of the Center's research program.

The Scientific Advisory Board of the Center selects about ten international fellows each year from the applications, who then come to Aachen in October to conduct research together at the Center for one year.

The Center's Funding Initiative

Käte Hamburger Centers are centers for cutting-edge research in the humanities/social sciences funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

In addition to the "classical centers", as of 2021 there are also centers that are characterized by transdisciplinary cooperation. The Aachen center is one of two transdisciplinary centers that promote collaboration between the humanities, social sciences as well as the life, natural, technical or engineering sciences.