The interdisciplinary and transregional orientation of ReCentGlobe enables multi-faceted research into globalisation projects. This takes place in research networks and in close cooperation with domestic and foreign partner institutions.
Focus of research activities
The research conducted by ReCentGlobe is interdisciplinary and transregional. This follows the insight that globalisation as a subject is too large to be comprehensively understood by one discipline alone. The global dynamics that are particularly prevalent today result from specific tensions:
- between the growing integration of the world through digitalization and increasing flows of goods, people, capital and cultural patterns and the limited willingness to adapt behaviour and attitudes to the convergence of different globalization projects,
- between the fragmentation of established social forms and the emergence of new forms of social integration as a result of global processes,
- between the universal claim of particular world experiences and conceptual worlds and the need to find common orientation across cultures in a converging world in order to master global challenges.
ReCentGlobe continues a long Leipzig tradition of interaction between history, human geography, and religious and regional studies and expands it to include contributions from law, social sciences and economics. ReCentGlobe understands regions as historically contingent constructs and, therefore, pursues a transregional approach that takes the construction of relevant spaces of action under conditions of globalisation as its central theme and places the resulting re-spatialization of the world at the centre of a global-historical narrative.
Globalisation does not automatically make the world more homogeneous, nor do global processes follow the same pattern everywhere. It is, therefore, important to think of globalisation in plural terms and as the result of the actions of specific actors. Their projects vary in scope and are intertwined in different ways through cooperation or competition. They form alliances to find answers to global dynamics or to take on new challenges that tend to be global in scale.
Globalisation projects cover virtually all social dimensions, from the economy to culture, from politics to religion, from social movements to environmental issues. The work of ReCentGlobe is characterised by the knowledge-promoting arrangement of case studies on various of these dimensions in as many different world regions as possible under a common question. These various research networks are guided by the overarching question of how the dialectic of dissolution of boundaries and re-spatialisation manifests itself in ever-new constellations under globalisation conditions.
Those who think of globalisation in plural terms are faced with the challenge of reflecting on the limits of their own ability to decenter historically established assumptions and experiential conceptions of the world. ReCentGlobe's research, therefore, requires close cooperation and fruitful dialogue with perspectives from other intellectual contexts and world-regional horizons of experience. Projects are therefore carried out in cooperation with domestic and foreign partners wherever possible.
Digitalisation is shaping the world more and more, and the volume of digital material for researching it is growing accordingly. As a result, digitalisation itself is becoming the subject of globalisation research in various ways while at the same time offering the opportunity to use and further develop tools to counter the swelling flood of data and avoid a relapse into crude data positivism.