Guiding Principles of the Focus Area Society & Sustainability

We, the focus area Society & Sustainability, have formulated our research interests in a mission statement. It describes our main areas of focus, such as cultural sustainability & socio-ecological transformation, democracy & justice, co-creative processes, and everyday realities & diversity, as well as our working methods, goals, and perspectives.

We have set ourselves the task of bringing together the concerns of different social groups, academic disciplines, and artistic and cultural fields of practice. Our aim is to enable a socio-critical examination of current issues and to explore forms of change together.
On this basis, we set artistic, cultural and academic practices in motion with the objective of concrete change.
We consider academic knowledge, cultural production and the arts as transformative forces that need to be interwoven on equal terms. Therefore, it is vital to carefully utilize their social and cultural possibilities to achieve sustainable effects. This understanding of transdisciplinary collaboration guides us to create open, empowering and critical spaces of communication and experimentation. Counteracting social inequalities and having a productive impact on conflict-driven conversations about democracy and the climate crisis is fundamental to our actions.

The mission statement as a PDF download

Online Version of the mission statement