In a current comparative research project the interaction between informational development and human development has been examined in various contexts, including Finland, Silicon Valley, Chile and Taiwan....
Over the past two centuries, the dominant view in social science has been that the modern world shows a pattern of linear development in which all positive trends go upward in more or less linear fashion...
Traditionally, teachers of reading and writing have assumed texts as monolingual and monomodal. This dominant orientation to textuality, variously referred to as alphabetic literacy or autonomous literacy,...
More likely than not, the world will be facing a series of serious crises, connected to climate change, environmental disasters, natural catastrophes, shortage of all kinds of raw materials and sources...
A study of how Malthus relates to understanding, and resolving, the food-land-population predicaments of sub-Saharan Africa. After “green revolutions”, most of Asia enjoys rapid growth and...
When it comes to low probability-high impact (even catastrophic) risk, the judgment of ordinary people, it seems, is not to be trusted.  Emotions (like fear) are said to override our capacity for rational...
This project seeks to overcome the (economistic, functionalist) limitations of received understandings of crisis, by drawing on the thought of Karl Polanyi, especially his 1944 work, The Great Transformation. ...
In 2005/2006 the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin hosted an inter-disciplinary research project on “secular modernity” in which world-renowned Fellows like Hans Joas (German sociologist at the Freiburh...
The discipline of Bioinformatics has emerged in the field of molecular and cell biology to deal with the huge amounts of information generated first by genomic and more recently by transcriptomic, proteomic,...
The advent of the knowledge society has placed the spotlight on the role of experts as gatekeepers and as brokers of knowledge. This is a problem that concerns developed and developing countries alike....
The project is concerned with the sustainability of democracy around the globe in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial and economic crisis. Its underlying hypothesis holds that the crisis might have occasioned...
Identity is a term much used yet hard to define. Perhaps for this reason, the concept has long been a favourite with philosophers, and for the very same reason has been avoided by brain scientists, –...