The Gutenberg Council for Young Researchers (GYR) provides funds for small postgraduate research groups ("Minigraduiertenkollegs") in the field of the Humanities and Social Sciences - each group comprising four to five doctoral candidates. One of the main objectives of these research groups is to create sustainable structures for promoting early career researchers by offering them the best possible conditions for working on their doctoral projects.
NEW: Fourth Call for Proposals for the Establishment of Postgraduate Research Groups in the Humanities and Social Sciences
To promote doctoral candidates in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) together with the Gutenberg Council for Young Researchers again supports the establishment of postgraduate research groups in the Humanities and Social sciences at JGU in the funding period 2024 to 2027.
The call for proposals is subject to the provision of funds.
Start of funding: 1 June 2024 or 1 July 2024.
Current call for proposals (in German only; The application can also be submitted in English.)
Current Postgraduate Research Groups in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Funding Period: 2021-2024
In the 2019 selection process, three new Research Groups with a duration of three years and a total funding volume of 762,000 EUR were approved.
Spokesperson: Prof. Dr. Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaja
Co-applicants: Prof. Dr. Mita Barnjee, Prof. Dr. Walter Bisang, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Marcus Maurer, Prof. Dr. Christian Schemer, Prof. Dr. Jochen Roeper
Research Agenda
Based on prior research and the preliminary studies conducted by participating principal investigators of the MGRK DIAPASON, the online information landscape in which today’s higher education students acquire a large amount of their domain-specific knowledge is analyzed in depth, structurally and semantically. To this end, approaches from communication science, linguistic typology, literary studies, medical and economics education and domain-specific didactics are included in five PhD projects. By describing the online sources most commonly used by medicine and economics students when solving domain-specific tasks in their respective domains (regular course assignments and Internet-based tasks), the contemporary online information landscape is “mapped” with regard to its media-specific, linguistic, narrative, subject-specific, and didactic properties and quality. The dataset to be systematically analyzed in the PhD projects is internationally unique and has already been collected from Internet-based assessments, including the initial analysis of log data of students’ online navigation, along with the information sources they used. The data corpus covers online information sources on selected study topics about key fundamental concepts in the domains of economics and medicine (from universities’ core curricula). The PhD projects in this MGRK analyze the information sources and students' learning outcomes (i.e. their written texts) in great depth, focusing on selected aspects to identify and classify characteristics of the online information that students use for learning over the course of their studies, which are expected to significantly influence their knowledge acquisition.
Given students’ increasing use of the Internet as their main information source in higher education today, this mapping of online information is one of the necessary prerequisites for understanding and explaining students’ domain-specific learning and knowledge development in the digital age.
Homepage (coming soon)
Spokesperson: Jun.-Prof. Dr. Constantin Wagner
Co-applicants: Prof. Dr. Karin Bräu, Prof. Dr. Alexandra Klein, Prof. Dr. Carmen Mörsch
Research Agenda
Intersektionale Diskriminierungserfahrungen sind allgegenwärtig. Schule, Soziale Arbeit, kulturelle
Bildung und Hochschulen stellen hier keine Ausnahmen dar. Im Hinblick auf Universitäten als Bildungs- und Wissenschaftsorganisationen wird damit einerseits virulent, inwiefern Diskriminierung
in Wissensbestände und -erwerb eingelagert ist und andererseits, welche Möglichkeiten diskriminierungskritischen Bildungsprozessen in der universitären Lehre zukommt. In den letzten Jahren
sind vermehrt selbst- und machtreflexive Lehr-/Lernmaterialien entstanden, die auch in der Hochschule eingesetzt werden. Gleichzeitig ist noch ungeklärt, welche Bedingungen für diskriminierungskritische Bildungsprozesse nötig sind, wie Widerstände produktiv gemacht und Prozesse eines diskriminierungskritischen Conceptual Change befördert werden können.
Unser Forschungsprogramm setzt an diesem Desiderat an: Im Rahmen universitärer Lehrveranstaltungen werden die Auseinandersetzung mit diskriminierungskritischen Materialien, die Umgangsweisen mit dabei auftretenden Widerständen sowie die Entwicklung von Haltungen und veränderten pädagogischen Handlungsweisen bei den Studierenden, kurz: Bildungsprozesse, untersucht. Dabei fokussieren wir auf die Auseinandersetzung mit Ungleichheit und Diskriminierungskritik im Bereich der Lehrer_innenbildung, der Sozialen Arbeit und der kulturellen Bildung.
Eine intersektionale Perspektive, welche von komplexen und miteinander verwobenen Ungleichheitsverhältnissen ausgeht, ermöglicht es, in der Analyse von universitären Lehr-/Lernsettings Homogenisierungen und kategoriale Zuschreibungen zu vermeiden und verschiedene Differenzlinien
in ihrem Zusammenwirken und ihrer Prozessierung in den Blick zu nehmen. Damit zielen wir auf
Wissensdesiderate von hoher Dringlichkeit und Relevanz, auf die es bislang im deutschen Kontext
noch keine befriedigenden Antworten gibt.
Homepage (coming soon)
Spokesperson: Prof. Dr. Claudia Landwehr
Co-applicants: Prof. Dr. Kai Arzheimer, Prof. Dr. Phillip Harms, Prof. Dr. Sascha Huber, Prof. Dr. Otte Gunnar
Research Agenda
Processes of polarization and the rise of populism seem to undermine foundations of liberal and
democratic institutions, giving rise to concerns about the state and future of democracy itself. We
assume that the liberal democratic order ultimately rests upon a procedural consensus on the
legitimacy and efficacy of its institutions, which grants these institutions resilience in times of trouble.
Societal transformation processes such as globalization, digitalization and pluralization cause
challenges to this consensus and seem to make institutional adaptation and reform necessary. Against
this background, the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic with its consequences constitutes a major shock,
triggering a crisis in which institutions need to prove their stability and resilience in a situation where cracks and fissures in the procedural consensus have already become apparent.
The Resilient Institutions group will assess factors that compromise or enhance institutional resilience both with regard to longer-term structural transformations of societies and in light of the Covid-19 shock. Supervisors and graduate students have backgrounds in different disciplines that each study institutions from a distinct angle: economics, political science and sociology. From this broad interdisciplinary perspective, the PhD-projects explore how societal transformation processes and the acute crisis create challenges for liberal representative democracy. Collaboratively, the group will seek to map the scope and content of the procedural consensus on liberal democratic institutions in order to gain an estimate of how firmly these are rooted in mass support and thus how likely they remain to withstand contestation. In their individual projects, graduate students address questions regarding the importance of diffuse support for democracy, the effects of institutional design on democratic legitimacy, changes in processes of opinion and will formation, shifting loyalties and emerging new cleavages.
Funding period: 2018-2021
Main applicant: Prof. Dr. Barbara Thums
Co-applicants: Prof. Dr. Michael Roth, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Mirko Uhlig
Main applicant: Prof. Dr. Arne Nagels
Co-applicants: Prof. Dr. Silvia Hansen-Schirra, Prof. Dr. Walter Bisang
Main applicant: Prof. Dr. Alexandra Schneider
Co-applicants: Prof. Dr. Friedemann Kreuder, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Kristina Köhler, Prof. Dr. Gabriele Schabacher, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Sarah Scholl-Schneider, Prof. Dr. Michael Simon, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Julia Stenzel, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Mirko Uhlig, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Benjamin Wihstutz
Former Postgraduate Research Groups in the Humanities and Social Sciences
The Executive Committee of the Gutenberg Council for Young Researchers approved six "mini-graduate schools" in the humanities and social sciences in 2015 which were extended by one year in 2017.