Archive Events in 2019

Künstliche Intelligenz (KI) – das sind Computersysteme, Maschinen und Roboter, die selbstständig dazulernen können. KI steckt im Smartphone, in Verkehrsleitsystemen und in vielen Maschinen in Haushalt und Fabrik. Ersetzen Roboter Menschen oder verbessern sie unser Arbeitsleben und unseren Alltag? Wie kann KI verantwortungsvoll genutzt werden?

Moderated by Swen Hutter

Mit der Zunahme erneuerbarer Energien gehen neue Chancen und Herausforderungen für die Energiewende einher. Ein weiterer Ausbau von Windenergie- und Photovoltaikanlagen erfordert zusätzliche Flexibilität. Im Wärme- und insbesondere im Verkehrssektor wurden bislang keine wesentlichen Einsparungen an CO2-Emissionen erzielt. Eine Lösung für diese Probleme wird in Power-to-X-Technologien (P2X) gesehen. Mit Hilfe von Strom (Power) werden Stoffe (X) erzeugt, die erneuerbare Energien binden und flexibel nutzbar machen.

This lecture responds to two puzzles. The first is why it is not more widely accepted that the neoliberal era can be effectively understood to be a marriage between an Ordoliberal celebration of free markets and the late twentieth-century rational choice revolution in the social sciences. The second is why neoliberalism continues to be confused with classical liberalism, despite the fact that the latter is a normative system of rights, while the former jettisons moral normativity in favor of hypothetical descriptivism.

Please note that registration for the conference has closed.

A livestream of the full event will be made available here.

This project, seed-funded by the OX-BER partnership, explores the potential challenges in linking policies oriented to the pre-parental phase of family with those oriented to the parental phase. Theories on the latter are far more developed than on the former, certainly from a social policy perspective. Moreover, the two phases of life are typically treated in isolation and by distinct research fields. Policies for the preparental phase tend to be considered from a public health perspective whereas the parental phase tends to be the province of classical family policies.

Karl Marx famously considered the proletariat to be a universal class in a twofold sense. It suffers from an injustice (“Unrecht schlechthin”) that is of universal nature in that its overcoming would mean the true liberation of all humans, and it is a class that stretches across various countries, defined by its location in the capitalist mode of production.

Europa steht vor großen Herausforderungen. Gleichwohl begreifen viele Bürger*innen diese Herausforderungen auch als Chance, um politisch für ein gemeinsames Europa aktiv zu werden. Im Zuge der Wahlen zum Europäischen Parlament im Mai 2019 gewannen zivilgesellschaftliche Initiativen und proeuropäische transnationale politische Bewegungen jenseits der etablierten Parteien an Zuwachs und Aufmerksamkeit. Die Erwartungen von Seiten der
Zivilgesellschaft und der Politik an diese Wahlen waren groß: Die Europawahl sollte ein Schlüsselmoment darstellen und eine positive Weiterentwicklung

Die UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention ist seit zehn Jahren in Deutschland für alle staatlichen Stellen rechtsverbindlich. Zum Jubiläum ihres Inkrafttretens hat die Monitoring-Stelle UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention des Deutschen Instituts für Menschenrechte 2019 ihre Bilanz „Wer Inklusion will, sucht Wege …“ veröffentlicht, die Fortschritte und Probleme bei der Umsetzung der Rechte von Menschen mit Behinderungen in Deutschland aufzeigt.

Das Kinder- und Jugendhilferecht weiterzuentwickeln, ist eine stetige Aufgabe. Millionen junger Menschen und ihre Familien nehmen vielfältige Leistungen und Unterstützung der Kinder- und Jugendhilfe in Anspruch: von der Beratung und offenen Angeboten der Kinder- und Jugendarbeit über die Kindertagesbetreuung bis zu den Hilfen durch sozialpädago­gische Angebote, Pflegefamilien oder stationäre Einrichtungen.

The strategic landscape in the Middle East and beyond has significantly changed since the defeat and dismantling of the Islamic State in 2017-2018.

Two developments impact on the threat of jihadi terrorism in Europe and elsewhere: the building of an underground insurgency in Iraqi Sunni territory and the relocation of jihadi fighters, mainly to Afghanistan and Libya.

In this talk, Julian Eckl will draw on an ethnographic long-term study of sites of global health governance. At these sites, he has met people who presented themselves as experts, has witnessed conflicts over expertise, and was at times referred to as an expert himself. The goal of the talk will be to provide a perspective on global health governance that zooms in on the lived experiences of practitioners.

The spread of illiberal and autocratic tendencies challenges Europe's democracies. While in some European countries democratic institutions are already eroding, illiberal political parties are on the rise in others. How can we protect Europe's democracies from such dangers? This question is at the core of the closing event of the Berlin Democracy Conference 2019 addressing recommendations for action for political parties, civic education and the media landscape.

The WZB continues its 50th anniversary activities with a day-long scientific program set during the Berlin Science Week. The day will start off with the presentation ceremony of the A.SK Social Science Award, followed by three WZB Distinguished Lectures. A reception will conclude the anniversary event.

Please note that the event will be held in English without translation into German.

Program

11.15 a.m. - 1.00 p.m
A.SK Social Science Award Ceremony

We cordially invite you to the next session of our workshop series on Authoritarian Politics and International Relations at WZB!

Daniëlle Flonk will present a paper discussing Why Governments Censor: Comparing content Removal Requests Between Regimes.

Das Verhältnis zwischen Wissenschaft, Wissenschaftspolitik und Gesellschaft hat sich in den letzten Dekaden verändert. Mehr Transparenz und mehr Impact werden gefordert. Die Fragen, in welcher Weise die Gesellschaft von der Wissenschaft profitiert und welche Wissenschaft relevant und nützlich für die Lösung gesellschaftlicher Problemlagen ist, werden deutlicher und kritischer denn je gestellt.

„Ist der Mensch eine Maschine aus Fleisch?“ Mit dieser Frage tritt Joseph Weizenbaum, Computerpionier und Kritiker des technologischen Größenwahns, im Film „Plug & Pray“ zu seinem letzten Duell mit Raymond Kurzweil und Hiroshi Ishiguro an, den Schöpfern von Robotern, die uns ersetzen sollen. Eine faszinierende Reise zu den Laboratorien der künstlichen Intelligenz in USA, Japan, Deutschland und Italien beginnt. Aber nicht nur im Film soll gezeigt werden, was noch vor wenigen Jahrzehnten als Science-Fiction galt und jetzt längst zur Realität geworden ist.

Article 23 (1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides that ‘Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.’ In international human rights law, and many national constitutions, the right to work, just and decent conditions of work and free choice of employment are effectively merged.

Die Konferenz nimmt die ko-konstitutive Beziehung von Wissen und Recht in den Blick. Recht bedarf umfassender Wissensbestände, um ein- und umgesetzt zu werden. Wissen, das in der modernen Gesellschaft zunehmend als "Ressource" verstanden wird, bedarf immer schon, und mit Zunahme institutioneller Komplexitäten immer mehr, der rechtlichen Flankierung, Absicherung und Regelung.

Moderated by Shelly Kupferberg

Discussant: tba

We cordially invite you to the next session of our workshop series on Authoritarian Politics and International Relations at WZB! 

The conference explores political epistemologies of big data. Political epistemologies are practices by which societies construct politically relevant knowledge and the criteria by which they evaluate it. Big data is the practice of deriving socially relevant knowledge from massive and diverse digital trace data.

Moderated by Edgar Grande

Contemporary organizations are increasingly implementing flexible working time arrangements (FWTA) that provide workers with more control over individual working hours. Despite these changes, managers and policy-makers are less informed about whether these arrangements reduce worker turnover and for which populations of workers.

The WZB is planning an international conference on matching markets. The conference "Designing and evaluating matching markets,” starting in the morning of June 27, 2019, and ending on June 28, 2019, will take place at the WZB in Berlin. The conference is organized by Inácio Bó (WZB), Dorothea Kübler (WZB), and Lars Ehlers (University of Montreal).

Die Fachtagung, die 2011 ins Leben gerufen wurde, beschäftigt sich mit vielfältigen Fragen des Wissenschaftssystems und insbesondere der Rolle von Publikationen. In jährlichen Abständen treffen sich hier Herausgeber*innen und Redakteur*innen von sozial- und geisteswissenschaftlichen Zeitschriften, um aktuelle Fragen aus dem Zeitschriftenkontext miteinander zu diskutieren.

The tremendous growth of digital transactions –mainly through online platforms— has profoundly affected the way we interact, opening vast opportunities to improve our lives. Consumers have benefited from an unprecedented proliferation of new services and products that previously were simply too costly to be developed and marketed to customers. At the same time, network effects in platform business models have brought market power concerns back to the front stage.

Europe seems to be out of joint. Wherever you look, European integration is been questioned in fundamental ways; fears over migration and rising inequality are dominating public debate and fuelling the rise of populist parties. Positive stories are needed to reassert the game-changing power of European unity and to bring about change. This is where the combined contribution of science and culture comes into play.

European debates about the reception and accommodation of refugees have since the very beginning of the so called “refugee crisis” in 2015 circled around religious issues: Some (of the most secularized) postsocialist countries rediscovered their Christian cultural heritage as an argument against the immigration of Muslims, and in Germany reports on interreligious conflicts nurtured claims for a separation of refugees along religious lines. The talk draws on an extensive case study on religious diversity and practice in refugee accommodation centers in Lower Saxony.

Moderation: Heike Solga

Welche Unterstützungsstrukturen existieren in Österreich für den Übergang von Schule, Ausbildung und Beruf von Jugendlichen mit Behinderung? Welche Möglichkeiten der Partizipation existieren für junge Menschen?

Discussant: Alexandros Tokhi (WZB)

With the rise of Internet behemoths and the surveillance of increasingly personal domains there is a trend of questioning life online. This talk draws attention to hacking practices that interrogate the diverse faces of online veillance. I will first introduce current debates about hackers as interrogators of surveillance. Instead of portraying hacking as a simple counterculture I seek to complicate dichotomies of power vs. resistance, online vs. offline, and technological system vs. social practice.

On June 5, 2013, the publishing of thousands of secret documents began. These later became known as the “Snowden Revelations,” as the documents had been handed over to journalists by former NSA employee and whistleblower, Edward J. Snowden. They offered proof of the comprehensive global hacking and surveillance practices of the “Five Eyes” intelligence cooperation, mainly by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

Abstract

Diskussion mit Philipp Gassert und Dieter Rucht

Moderiert von Simon Teune und Swen Hutter

The core of the asylum regime is the principle of non-refoulement that prohibits governments from sending refugees back to their persecutors. Governments attempt to evade this legal obligation to which they have explicitly agreed by manipulating territoriality. A remote control strategy of “extra-territorialization” pushes border control functions hundreds or even thousands of kilometers beyond the state’s territory.

Im Jahr 2017 haben sich das Bündnis für Gute Arbeit des Landes Brandenburg und das international renommierte Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung Berlin (WZB) auf den Weg gemacht, um über „Gute Arbeit“ zu diskutieren und dabei Erfahrungen und Wissen auszutauschen. Die Arbeitswelt von heute befindet sich in einem dynamischen Wandel und es ist uns ein gemeinsames Anliegen, diesen Veränderungsprozess so zu gestalten, dass die Arbeit der Zukunft für alle Erwerbstätigen eine gute Arbeit ist.

Why is it that we describe our societies in terms of networks? Academic and popular literature usually suggests that computers and the internet produced the network society. However, there is another story to be told. Vincent August reveals how social and political thought deliberately enforced cybernetic network ideas to re-shape the way we think about society and politics.

Soziale Ungleichheit ist Gegenstand aktueller öffentlicher Debatten: Bleiben Ungleichheiten trotz einer boomenden Wirtschaft bestehen oder nehmen sie sogar zu? Wie werden Ungleichheiten über Generationen hinweg reproduziert? Warum werden Ungleichheiten gruppenspezifisch unterschiedlich wahrgenommen? Welche individuellen und gesellschaftlichen Folgen von Ungleichheit gibt es, insbesondere in Bezug auf politische Teilhabe?

It is now widely supposed in many democracies that the modern political campaign needs to be “data driven” to consolidate existing support and to find potential new voters and donors.  The capture of data on political opinions and affiliation permits the construction of profiles on individual voters and the “micro-targeting” of increasingly precise messages to increasingly refined segments of the electorate.  To what extent should modern campaigns be allowed to “know” the electorate?  The answer to this question relies to some extent on privacy and data protection rules, based on principles

The hour-glass ceiling refers to a ceiling on pay and advancement which arises when good jobs become predicated on long hours. This ceiling is time- not merit-based; it pushes otherwise qualified and capable women out of well-paid and influential jobs into short hour and less privileged jobs, compromising their income and earnings, creating a two-tiered, gender-polarised labour market that undermines equality. This seminar discusses recent research on how time and health are related.

Die Digitalisierung, soziale Medien und Phänomene wie Hackerangriffe oder Fake News stellen die Demokratie vor Herausforderungen. Dabei besteht ein Spannungsfeld zwischen den Chancen, die die Digitalisierung für eine optimale Beteiligung von Bürgerinnen und Bürgern am politischen Prozess bietet, und den Risiken, die die Resilienz der Demokratien im digitalen Zeitalter auf die Probe stellen können.

Roundtable with Clara Iglesias Keller (HIIG / Rio de Janeiro State University), Julia Pohle (WZB), Cornelius Puschmann (Hans-Bredow-Institut Hamburg) and Camille Roth (CNRS / CMB).

Moderation: Christian Mihr (Reporter ohne Grenzen)

Digital spaces have progressively become a significant part of the public space as a whole, and the dynamics of deliberation, communication and information in these spaces are key to understanding contemporary political and democratic processes.

California and Germany are among the largest economies of the world, and they also share similarly ambitious goals for achieving climate-neutral energy systems.

Wer hätte vor ein paar Jahren gedacht, dass Grundfragen der Demokratie in Deutschland zu Debatte stehen und intensiv diskutiert werden? Viele Wählerinnen und Wähler haben sich abgewandt und sind enttäuscht. Andere sind entschlossen, sich nicht entmutigen zu lassen und demokratische Standards zu verteidigen. Welchen Beitrag können ein Museum und ein wissenschaftliches Institut dazu leisten? Das WZB und das Deutsche Historische Museum (DHM) laden in der WZB-Reihe „Achtung: Demokratie“ zu einem Diskussionsforum über die neuen Herausforderungen für die Demokratie ein.

The Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE) brings together faculty and advanced graduate students in economics, political science, and other social science disciplines, with a combined focus on field-based research and political economy methods. The workshop involves in-depth discussions of papers and research designs that are circulated and read in advance, and is ideally suited for feedback on work-in-progress.

Organizers: Ana Garcia-Hernandez, Alexandra Scacco, Michael Seese

Moderated by Anette Fasang

Discussant: Macartan Humphreys
Moderated by Swen Hutter

The European Union (EU) is facing one of the rockiest periods in its existence. No time in its history has it looked so economically fragile, so unsecure about how to protect its borders, so divided over how to tackle the crisis of legitimacy facing its institutions, and so under assault of Eurosceptic parties. The unprecedented levels of integration in recent decades has led to increased public contestation, yet at the same the EU is more reliant on public support for its continued legitimacy than ever before. Catherine E.

Discussant: tba

“Wir sind das Volk”, “defending the heartland”, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”—these are the rallying cries of populists across the globe. If nothing else, a strong anti-elitism unites those parties and movements. However, it remains unclear why this assertion would resonate with citizens if they felt well represented.

Die liberale Demokratie ist in Bedrängnis. Jenseits sozialer und ökonomischer Konflikte reichen neue Auseinandersetzungen tief in die Identität und Kultur der westlichen Gesellschaften hinein. Konflikte über Grenzen, Migration, Menschenrechte und den Umgang mit Minderheiten führen zu einer stärkeren Politisierung und Mobilisierung. Viele Menschen engagieren sich und wollen die Welt verändern. Gleichzeitig sind die Eliten in die Kritik geraten. Eine zunehmende Sprachlosigkeit zwischen den verschiedenen gesellschaftlichen Gruppen erschwert die Suche nach Lösungen.

Migration is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. Many countries in Europe and North America have experienced a stark increase in the size and diversity of their immigrant and refugee populations. Reeling and reactive, governments are struggling to facilitate their successful integration. Much is at stake in this process. With the right approach, governments can set up immigrants for success and thereby strengthen the economy and enrich civil society.

Since its foundation in the 1970s, the Manifesto Project has provided data for measuring party positions and preferences based on parties’ electoral programs. The Manifesto Dataset which offers data on party preferences on specific policy issues and overarching policy scales in over 60 countries has strongly influenced research on political parties in the last decades. Recently, the Manifesto Project has extended its data collection and now provides access to the Manifesto Corpus – the digital and annotated manifesto collection of MARPOR.

Discussant: Wolfgang Merkel
Moderated by Swen Hutter

When do voters form accurate perceptions of party positions, and when do they feel certain about their perceptions? We believe that information availability plays a crucial role, and argue that election campaigns, by increasing information availability, enhance voter accuracy and certainty. Yet, we also argue that campaigns are less effective for voters’ perceptions about governing parties’ positions. In addition, we argue that changing party positions reduce voter certainty.

Democracy is a system of peaceful conflict resolution. It places an absolute ban on the exercise, tolerance, and encouragement of political violence. Existing democracies, however, are not immune to violent action but suffer from multiple forms of political violence. Antidemocratic actors who openly justify and exercise violence are one part of the problem. Those who are suspicious of acting as their masterminds, accomplices, or sympathizers are the other part.

Using a new measure of “comprehensive democracy,” our analysis traces the global democratic trend over the last 116 years, from 1900 until 2016, looking in particular at the centennial trend’s cultural zoning. As it turns out, democracy has been proceeding and continues to differentiate the world’s nations in a strongly culture-bound manner: high levels of democracy remain a distinctive feature of nations in which emancipative values have grown strong over the generations.

We invite researchers to submit papers or extended abstracts to the 4th Economics of Media Bias Workshop. Organized by the eponymous research network, the workshop will be a platform to discuss current research, exchange ideas, and explore new collaboration scenarios.
As a group of economists and political scientists, we investigate forms, causes, and consequences of media bias, especially in news markets. Main questions of interest are:

Klimawandel, Energie- und Verkehrswende – in den nächsten Jahrzehnten kommen große Veränderungen auf die Bürgerinnen und Bürger zu. In der Politik wird die Vernetzung über Ressortgrenzen hinweg immer wichtiger, wenn es darum geht – auch unbequeme – politische Entscheidungen über neue Mobilitätsformen oder Klimaschutzmaßnahmen zu treffen. Wie lässt sich Akzeptanz für diese neuen Energie- und Fortbewegungsmodelle schaffen? Welche Rolle kann hier die Forschung spielen?

While in most Western democracies women support left-leaning and progressive parties at higher rate than men, five decades ago the opposite was the case. To explain the realignment along gender lines on the left, we analyze it jointly with the rise of the radical right – two phenomena usually studied separately. Unlike most studies of the gender gap, we focus on men’s vote. We contend that occupational vulnerability to trade and immigration pulled manual and non-unionized workers to support the radical right.

In cooperation with the doctoral program “Work and its Subjects” at the University of Duisburg-Essen, the WZB doctoral program “Good Work” is organizing an interdisciplinary PhD conference. International PhD students from different disciplines who have dedicated their PhD project to the topic of “work” in a broad sense will come together to exchange their progress and to connect with each other.

(supported by CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition)

Die Wissenschaftsfreiheit steht in einigen Ländern unter Druck: Forschungsergebnisse werden immer wieder öffentlich diskreditiert, der internationale Austausch zwischen Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern behindert, unbequemen Forschenden die nötigen finanziellen Mittel entzogen. In Deutschland können wir Angriffe auf die Wissenschaft in dieser Dramatik zwar noch nicht beobachten. Dennoch: Auch hier sieht sich die Wissenschaft immer stärkeren Rechtfertigungszwängen ausgesetzt.

Die Veranstaltung ist ausgebucht, leider sind keine Anmeldungen mehr möglich!

The Berlin Applied Micro Seminar (BAMS) is a weekly seminar, jointly organized by DIW Berlin, Hertie School of Governance, HU Berlin, FU Berlin, TU Berlin, WZB, the Berlin Centre for Consumer Policies (BCCP) and the SFB TRR 190.

We cordially invite you to the next session of our workshop series on Authoritarian Politics and International Relations at WZB!