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Funding extended!

Leibniz Senate approves funding for a further 4 years!

Philipp Ziebart

The Leibniz Association has awarded the ‘Leibniz ScienceCampus – Postdigital Participation – Braunschweig’ (LWC PdP), which was launched in 2019, 1.2 M € to fund it for a further four years. This enables the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute (GEI) and its partners to continue their successful interdisciplinary research into postdigital participation in the areas of education and urban development, and to further expand this research.

The 19 current Leibniz ScienceCampi in Germany provide Leibniz Institutes and Universities the opportunity to form regional partnerships to explore specific themes. The aim is for them to pursue strategic research, to encourage interdisciplinary work in projects and methodologies, to raise the visibility of the respective locations and to consolidate their research profiles.

In order to achieve this goal the Leibniz Institute for Educational media | Georg Eckert Institute (GEI) has been working for the last four years with the Technischen Universität Braunschweig, the German Maritime Museum | DSM Bremerhaven, the Haus der Wissenschaft Braunschweig and the Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences in the Leibniz ScienceCampus – Postdigital Participation – Braunschweig. The Campus brings researchers from the fields of cultural studies, social sciences and information technology together with local and regional interest groups in Social Living Labs, where they jointly research, design and explore topics related to digital participation in education and urban mutual living. The focus of the Campus is on developing digitally supported forms of participation for the region as well as on shaping public, transregional discourse on (post)digitality and participation.  

Prof. Eckhardt Fuchs, director of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute and spokesperson for the Leibniz ScienceCampus – Postdigital Participation underlined that ‘Civic participation is decisive in a democratic society. This postdigital era opens up new ways for people to become engaged and to influence communal decision-making processes. The fact that the work of the Leibniz ScienceCampus – Postdigital Participation can continue for another four years is therefore of great social relevance for our region’.

The topics addressed by the participating projects range from media constellations in education, and cultural involvement in museums to communication possibilities for location-based services, bottom-up approaches for low-threshold participation in urban life and increased mobility for senior citizens.

 ‘The granting of a second funding phase, running until 2027, will allow the Leibniz ScienceCampus to build upon the results of the initial phase. We will combine our postdigital participation approach with a thematic consolidation in the areas of education and urban development on the one hand and with a thematic focus on the areas of sustainability and economics for the common good on the other’ explains Prof. Felicitas Macgilchrist, the Campus’s deputy spokesperson and head of the Media | Transformation department at the GEI. The Campus will also be expanded to include the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) and the Institute for Educational Studies at the TU Braunschweig.