Change of Contemporary Societies

The Main Research Area centres on the Institute for Work, Skills and Training (IAQ), the Institute for Development and Peace (INEF), the Institute of East Asian Studies (IN-EAST), the Institutes of Political Science (IfP) and Sociology (IfS), and the Rhine-Ruhr Institute for Social Research and Policy Consulting (RISP), an associated institute of the University of Duisburg-Essen with a high level of third-party funding. All these institutions, at which some 150 researchers work, are represented on the Research Council of this Main Research Area; its goal is to promote cross-disciplinary cooperation within the areas mentioned in the institutes and the university as a whole. A number of collaborations have already been formed as a result, including between the Institute of Social Work and Social Policy at the Faculty of Educational Sciences and the Essen-based Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI).
The Main Research Area not only creates common perspectives, e.g. by holding an annual forum on issues relating to the social sciences under the title of "Großes Sozialwissenschaftliches Forum", but also initiates and supports research projects by financing workshops or personnel to prepare applications, supporting research trips, or holding international conferences.
In the first 12 months of its existence, around 35 projects were sponsored, from publications in peer-reviewed journals to preparation of the most diverse applications for research sponsorship, for example to the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) or the Ministry for Intergenerational Affairs, Family, Women and Integration in North Rhine-Westphalia (MGFFI).
The academics within the Main Research Area are responsible for determining the specific focus of their projects. They include work on change in working society and its mechanisms of integration, changed forms of governance from a national and international perspective, and the development of sociological methods.