Social and Economic Spaces

The research cluster Social and Economic Spaces is geared toward doctoral candidates dealing with social, economic, and related cultural processes, practices, and structures. These perspectives are in turn connected to political, institutional, legal, and knowledge history aspects and approaches. The topics can be localized in local, regional, national, inter- and transnational, European, and global spaces as well as in overlapping social spaces constituted through interaction and communication, ideas and perceptions, cooperation, competition and conflict, and disparities and inequalities. The cluster is open to a broad spectrum of historical and cultural studies, each of which is analyzed in specific space-time configurations.

The researchers involved in this research cluster hail from the disciplines of European ethnology, social history, economic history, global history, and history of science and thus represent a broad variety of methodological and theoretical approaches. The focus is transdisciplinary and trans-epochal from the Middle Ages to the present.

For the doctoral researchers, the cluster is designed to promote reflection and exchange on the topics and approaches of their dissertation projects in smaller and larger seminar formats, to open up paths into the international research landscape and, in particular, to support the candidates’ own initiative towards independent presentation and publication of research results and the organization of scientific exchange.