TRA 4 Ankündigungen für den wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchs

Die sechs Transdisziplinären Forschungsbereiche (TRA) der Universität Bonn veröffentlichen hier eine gemeinsame Ausschreibung, um hochinnovative, transdisziplinäre Forschungsprojekte von Forscher*innen aus mindestens zwei verschiedenen TRAs zu fördern. Die geförderten Projekte sollen neue und relevante Fragestellungen an der Schnittstelle zwischen den Disziplinen behandeln oder auf die Entwicklung neuer Methoden abzielen, die die Grenzen bestehender Forschungsfragen erweitern.

Der innovative und disziplinenübergreifende Charakter des Antrags ist die wichtigste Voraussetzung für eine Förderung. Die Fortführung bereits etablierter Projekte wird nicht gefördert.

In association with the Udo Keller Stiftung Forum Humanum and the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies (University of Bonn), the International Centre for Philosophy (IZPH) is offering up to 10 Forum Humanum fellowships to qualified doctoral and masters students from any department in the social sciences or humanities at the University of Bonn to participate in an event to be held at the recently founded Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities at the New School for Social Research (NYC).

Researchers within the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies investigate how institutions mediate complex relationships between individuals and society and from there develop a new view of micro-phenomena (development of personality, agency, individualization) as well as macro-phenomena (world society, globalization). Sharing this research objective, the Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities is founded on the premise that genuine knowledge acquisition, truth and objectivity are not the exclusive preserve of any single discipline or method. The concepts we deploy to understand and evaluate human cultural and scientific achievements also have to be placed within their broader social, political and intellectual context and therefore have to be approached from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. The Institute thus aims to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines and draw on the resources of the social sciences, philosophy, and the humanities more generally, in order to pursue a collaborative understanding of the nature and goals of the humanistic and social scientific disciplines and to grapple with the challenges they face in light of the increasing prevalence of intellectual models imported from other disciplines.

Annemarie Schimmel’s life and work has built bridges between East and West, between Islam and Christianity and has inspired researchers of religion around the globe. On the occasion of her 100th birthday, the Annemarie Schimmel Fellowship was established to give international PhD students and young scholars the opportunity for a stay at the International Center for Comparative Theology and Social Issues (CTSI) at Bonn University to pursue research in the field of Comparative Theology.

The Fellowship will support the CTSI’s goal of providing a space for exchange and bridge-building between various religious traditions.

AI-powered recommender systems are now a ubiquitous part of our lives. The next news article we read, movie we watch, song we listen to, product we buy and social media post we see, are most likely recommended to us by an algorithm. Due to their global and fast spread in the last decade, both legal and philosophical research has yet to explore implications that recommender systems have for our lives in a digitalized society. The European Commission, in its Proposal for a Digital Services Act, defines ‘recommender system’ as fully or partially automated system used by an online platform to suggest in its online interface specific information to recipients of the service. Recommender systems determine relevance for users, oftentimes using personal data and profiles to determine the relative relevance of recommended content. The ever-changing technological landscape requires a detailed philosophical and ethical analysis to both evaluate existing legislation and shape future regulatory measures.

The use of recommender systems gives rise to various philosophical questions. How can relevance be defined? Whom are recommendations benefitting? More fundamentally, how should we
understand the concept of a recommendation? This understanding will feed into an ethical framework for recommender systems which mitigates the widespread harms associated with them.
These harms include: exposing children to inappropriate content, personal information being inferred by others who see which items get recommended to a particular user, reducing choices
offered to users, and recommending items in a way that is unfair to particular groups of users. Developing a systematic ethical framework for recommender systems will help those designing them to reduce these harms. The respect of ethical guidelines in the framework at design stage can be part of legal instruments, such as a certification. Other possible legal approaches include sector-specific regulation of recommender systems concerning, for example, news or online marketplaces. Sectorspecific (national) paths to the regulation of recommender systems are to be analyzed in comparison to the proposed EU Digital Services Act, which - in its current version - barely scratches the surface of the regulatory need associated with recommender systems. It limits the regulation of recommendation systems to large online platforms, which then have to provide transparency and choice of options for users.

In association with the Udo Keller Stiftung Forum Humanum, the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies (University of Bonn) is offering 2 further Forum Humanum fellowships, to qualified doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers from any department in the social sciences or humanities at the University of Bonn to participate in an event to be held at the recently founded Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities at the New School for Social Research (NYC).

Researchers within the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies investigate the complex relationships between individuals, institutions and societies. They aim to develop a new perspective on micro-phenomena (e.g. development of personality, competences, individualization) as well as macrophenomena (e.g. world society, globalization). One of many central research goals is to identify key factors that influence social cohesion, equal opportunities, efficiency, resource protection and the development of individual skills in the context of all these factors.

Sharing this research objective, the Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities is founded on the premise that genuine knowledge acquisition, truth and objectivity are not the exclusive preserve of any single discipline or method. The concepts we deploy to understand and evaluate human cultural and scientific achievements also have to be placed within their broader social, political and intellectual context and therefore have to be approached from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. The Institute thus aims to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines and draw on the resources of the social sciences, philosophy, and the humanities more generally, in order to pursue a collaborative understanding of the nature and goals of the humanistic and social scientific disciplines and to grapple with the challenges they face in light of the increasing prevalence of intellectual models imported from other disciplines.

Digital Fragmentations and Digital Sovereignty
In the past years, a growing prominence of the idea of “digital sovereignty” as well as multiple data localization regulations have called the vision of a global, open Internet into question. Data
localization requirements could splinter the current global internet into many regional systems and shape innovation dynamics in a wider variety of data-utilizing sectors. Accordingly, the idea of the fragmentation or Balkanization of the Internet began to play a bigger role in debates on global Internet governance. This debate covers the Internet as an infrastructure as such and increasingly blurs the boundaries between geopolitics, national jurisdictions, and a power struggle for the future of global governance. The resulting discursive and policy fragmentations are likely going to be with us for a long time and many of the underlying tensions could intensify.

Against this background, this project advances theorizations and conceptual understandings of digital sovereignty and fragmentations in cyberspace. To take up the challenge of understanding
the problem of digital fragmentation and its interplay with the notion of “digital sovereignty”, we aim to theorize the degree to which the Internet is becoming or fragmented and the understand
the diver’s modes of fragmentation to which parts of the Internet are subjected, and which actors and processes are driving forces for fragmentation.