Challenging extreme claims for truth: How to deliberate the open, pluralist society with monist thinkers
Imagine we are dealing with a person with a rather monistic mindset, thus believing, assuming or hoping that all questions can only have one right answer, that all these answers can be neatly, harmoniously ordered...
British-European Tourism After Brexit: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
For most people who have been watching the story of Brexit unfold, it’s been mostly about the political and economic implications. Moreover, the focus is on the impact Brexit will have on the British people...
Branding of cities: to whom is the city advertized and what fundamental idea lies behind it?
“Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief”, is one of the famous quotations of 20th century-advertisement and branding Guru, Leo Burnett. As a resident of the...
Berlin’s Evolving Relationships With Its Memorials
What is the purpose of these memorials? And who are they for? What is Berlin’s evolving relationship between commemoration and tourism? Riddled with important historical events and countless memorial sites to commemorate them, Berlin now faces...
Are There Too Many PhDs?
In all OECD countries, but in particular in Germany, there seems to be an enormous overproduction of PhDs – in case one sees a PhD as the starting point of an academic career or as...
Angry, but not bad people on the Brandenburg countryside
We are in a small town in rural Brandenburg and talk for two days with 32 long-term unemployed people. Most of them are older than 50. They opted to become a part of a reintegration-program...
All the lonely people – the epidemic of loneliness and its consequences
As we walk the streets of our cities and pass by a stranger heading in the opposite direction, we often avert our eyes, turn slightly to the side, glance down, or pull out our phones...
Alienation Online: An Analysis of Populist Facebook Pages In Brandenburg
This year, as part of the Social Science Works project ‘Deliberation gegen Populismus’ we have been monitoring right-wing populist Facebook pages associated with Brandenburg. The project was financed by Tolerantes Brandenburg and included work from...
Academic Conferences Should Be Outlawed
It’s conference season! Thousands and thousands of social scientists are flying around to visit conferences. The American Sociological Association gathers with more than 4000 participants in 600 sessions in Chicago. In 2014 the journey went...
A Deliberative Workshop with Chechen
Since 2016 Social Science Works has implemented more than forty rows of workshops with refugees and natives in which we discuss, among others, ethical and political pluralism, democracy, civic society, freedom (of expression, association and...
“People have to work!” A Deliberation at a Secondary School in Brandenburg
This “Schule mit Courage” in a town East of Berlin has in total 330 pupils. About a third are first generation migrants or refugees (mostly from Syria or Afghanistan). The school works with a refugee...
“Super Volunteerism”: A Grass-Roots Solution to Global Prejudice
An Anecdotal Foreword: The Case for Solution-Based Research and Inductive Reasoning By Christina Pao (Yale University ’20) In summer 2017, I had the opportunity to volunteer for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) as a...