Four COVID-19 research projects receive funding from the Volkswagen Foundation
Aiming to address the many new questions brought up in context of the pandemic, the Volkswagen Foundation had published a call for proposals titled “Corona Crisis and Beyond – Perspectives for Science, Scholarship and Society” in May. Out of 1,105 proposals, 102 were approved, among them three projects from the department of social sciences and philosophy and one from the chair of Computational Corpus Linguistic in cooperation with the chair of Japanese Studies. A great success for the faculty!
The projects will be funded for a period of 18 months with a sum of 120,000 euros. In total, the foundation is providing 11.7 million euros for research investigating the societal challenges brought on by the crisis.
More about the projects:
“The Public (Re-)Negotiation of Intergenerational Solidarity and Responsibility in the Corona-Pandemic“ (Dr. Larissa Pfaller)
Project coordinator Dr. Larissa Pfaller and her team at the institute of sociology are addressing the topic of intergenerational responsibility and solidarity during the pandemic. The project titled „The Public (Re-)Negotiation of Intergenerational Solidarity and Responsibility in the Corona-Pandemic“ is a cooperation between FAU and Oldenburg University, where Prof. Dr. Mark Schweda (Professor for Ethics in Medicine) and his team are located.
Solidarity and responsibility between the generations have become central and much-discussed keywords in the public debate. The Erlangen-Oldenburg research team is examining how solidarity ties between older and younger generations are being mediated in medial and political discourse, and how concepts of responsibility are framed. To achieve this, the project empirically evaluates press and public debates and speeches by politicians and investigates how they refer to responsibility and solidarity, and how their use of the terms can be evaluated in the context of Ethics.
“Spring in Mitterteich” (Dr. Marie-Kristin Döbler and Annerose Böhrer)
How do we deal with insecurities, how do we express criticism? Dr. Marie-Kristin Döbler and Annerose Böhrer from the institute of sociology are working on these questions. For a time period between March and April 2020, they are qualitatively analysing how the population of Mitterteich deals with uncertainty and insecurity, as well as their doubts and criticism of political measures.
The study „Spring in Mitterteich – A qualitative analysis of critical positions, epistemic struggles and discursive dynamics” examines the town Mitterteich in the Upper Palatinate. Back in March and April, this area saw the first implementation of curfews in Germany. The researchers are investigating inhabitants’ voices of criticism and their doubts about the measures and the resultative reactions of fellow citizens and the media. For their analysis, they are using social media content, reports in local newspapers, and personal interviews. Mitterteich was the focus of the national and international press at the beginning of the pandemic. How the press reported on Mitterteich is also part of the study.
“Autocracies and COVID-19” (Prof. Dr. Thomas Demmelhuber)
Prof. Dr. Thomas Demmelhuber, currently holding the Chair of Middle East Politics and Society, is investigating whether the pandemic is accelerating collaborations between autocratic states. There is a constant exchange between China and the Arab Gulf monarchies via the new Silk Road. Together with his project partners in Freiburg and Bonn, Prof. Demmelhuber is investigating how this channel is also being used to advertise autocracies as a more efficient model of governance during the Corona pandemic. China has fought the pandemic using extensive repression and surveillance technologies such as Tracing Apps and artificial intelligence. These methods are now being imitated as “Best-Practice-Models” by other autocracies. The surveillance technologies and the Chinese model serve to monitor the population more effectively and consolidate the autocratic rule of the Arab Gulf monarchies.
The project „Global autocratic collaboration in times of COVID19: game changer or business as usual in Sino-Gulf relations?“ is a cooperation with the university of Freiburg and the Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient in Bonn (CARPO).
“Tracking the infodemic: Conspiracy theories in the corona crisis” (Prof. Dr. Stefan Evert and Prof. Dr. Fabian Schäfer)
This research project applies innovative corpus-linguistic methods to analyse the use and distribution of typical linguistic patterns of conspiracy theories and study the discursive strategies they share with right-wing populist and extremist discourses. Besides providing important insights regarding the Corona pandemic, the goal is to operationalise and automate the used methods so that they can be applied to the spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation in the future.