Postdigital Participation Leibniz ScienceCampus in Braunschweig receives further funding

Press release of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute

The Leibniz Association has decided to fund the “Leibniz ScienceCampus – Postdigital Participation – Braunschweig” (LWC PdP), founded in 2019, with 1.2 million euros for another four years. This will enable the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute (GEI) and its partner institutions, including Technische Universität Braunschweig, to continue and expand their successful interdisciplinary research on postdigital participation in the fields of education and urban development.

The Leibniz ScienceCampus in Braunschweig receives further funding. Photo credit: Kvalifik/unsplash

The total of 19 existing Leibniz ScienceCampuses in Germany enable Leibniz institutes and universities to cooperate in a thematically focused manner in the sense of a regional partnership. The aim is to conduct strategic research, promote interdisciplinarity in projects and methods, increase the visibility of the respective location and strengthen its research profile.

To achieve this goal, the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute (GEI) has been working for four years with Technische 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”. In this campus, researchers from the cultural, social and technical sciences come together with local and regional stakeholders in Social Living Labs to jointly research, design and reflect on the topic of digital participation in education and urban coexistence. The focus is on developing digitally supported forms of participation with a regional focus as well as shaping public, supra-regional discourses on (post-)digitality and participation.

Participating from TU Braunschweig are the Institute for Information Systems (Prof. Wolf-Tilo Balke), the Institute for Sustainable Urbanism ISU (Prof. Vanessa Miriam Carlow), the Institute for Architecture-Related Art (Prof. Folke Köbberling), the Institute of Business Information Systems, Department of Service Information Systems (Prof. Susanne Robra-Bissantz) and newly the Institute for Computer Graphics (Prof. Martin Eisemann) as well as the Institute for Educational Sciences (Prof. Julia Gerick and Prof. Svenja Vieluf).

Prof. Dr Eckhardt Fuchs, Director of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute and spokesperson for the Leibniz ScienceCampus – Postdigital Participation emphasises: “Citizen participation is crucial for a democratic society. In the post-digital era, new ways are opening up for people to get involved and influence local decision-making processes. It is therefore highly relevant to society to continue the work of the Leibniz ScienceCampus – Postdigital Participation for the next four years in our region.”

The topics represented in the participating projects range from media constellations in education and cultural participation in museums to communication possibilities of location-based services and bottom-up approaches for low-threshold participation in city life to mobility for senior citizens.

“The approval of a second funding phase until 2027 enables us at the Leibniz ScienceCampus to build on the results of the first phase. Here we combine our approach of postdigital participation on the one hand with a thematic deepening in the areas of education and urban development and on the other hand with a thematic focus on the areas of sustainability and the common good economy,” adds Prof. Dr. Felicitas Macgilchrist, deputy spokesperson of the Campus and head of the Department of Medial Transformations at the GEI. Institutionally, the Campus will also be expanded to include the Braunschweig University of Art and the Institute of Educational Sciences at TU Braunschweig as partner institutions.