(Post-)Graduate Support at its Best!

Research Focus - Meetings - Events

Purpose of the initiative and fundamental questions

The concept of responsibility is equally omnipresent in public media as well as in academic and political discourse. This presence demonstrates the concept’s pivotal role  to understand contemporary phenomena and developments better. Both the contexts in which the term “responsibility” is used and its meanings are constantly multiplying. These dynamics make the key concept of responsibility more difficult to grasp and analyse.

The GRADE Initiative CoRe has set itself the goal of systematically placing the attribution, assumption, averting and bearing of responsibility into the focus of social and cultural science inquiry. In our opinion, it is necessary to work on a broad range of research results from various (sub-)disciplines. In this way, different empirically and theoretically significant dimensions of the concept of responsibility can be made accessible across institutional boundaries; thereby, the concept can be mobilized and operationalized as an inspiration for future research projects. Furthermore, it is our goal to establish a fruitful relationship between the working groups’ members’ current research interests and existing debates through regular and structured exchange. The focus here is primarily on questions of reponsibilisation in the sense of processes of 'responsibility-making'. In this way, a thought collective is to be created at the Goethe University Frankfurt, which, based on common interest concerning the concept of responsibility, will develop a differentiated and dynamic position that can be made fruitful for broader discussions. This position will be actively introduced and further developed in various discussion contexts through participation in and organisation of workshops, conferences, publications and lecture series. In particular the explicitly multidisciplinary composition of the initiative underpins the goal and ensures that the perspective of the CoRe Initiative is broad and at the same time well-founded on different bodies of knowledge.