Related Activities
Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence "WorldEU"
Duration: 01.01.2025 – ongoing
The CoE "Europe in the World" project aims to foster academic exchange and knowledge dissemination on Europe's global role. It integrates teaching, workshops, and public events involving scholars, students, policymakers, and citizens. Key activities include lecture series, Model United Nations seminars, excursions to Brussels, and an online course on the EU. The project also emphasizes research collaborations, with a focus on publishing results through peer-reviewed journals and international conferences.
The CoE is coordinated by Prof. Dr. Claudia Wiesner at Fulda University of Applied Sciences, supported by effective project management and extensive outreach through digital platforms and social media.
Continuous Construction of Resilient Social Contracts through Societal Transformations (CO3)
Duration: 01.02.2024 – 31.01.2027
The Continuous Construction of Resilient Social Contracts Through Societal Transformations (CO3) project is dedicated to strengthening the political and social resilience of democracies in the face of societal challenges, crises, and anti-democratic tendencies. Through rigorous research, innovative methodologies and extensive stakeholder engagement, we promote and develop a more democratic, inclusive, and open model of social contracts for contemporary societies.
Point Alpha Research Institute (PARI)
Date: Since 01.01.2022
PARI is an inter- and transdisciplinary research institute that conducts and promotes research in three fields:
- The Cold War and its implications for today
- Border Studies
- Democracy and the Global Order
PARI unites junior und senior researchers in the social and cultural sciences, carries out research projects, organizes symposia, conferences and workshops and offers doctoral, postdoctoral and senior fellowships as well as conference grants.
International Conference "Theorising the EU's Crisis"
The European Union is regarded to be in a severe crisis at least since 2008, when the financial crisis began to hit. This labelling brings about several questions. The first ones concern the concept of crisis as such – crisis is a concept that is often criticised for both being used in inflationary manner and be a catch-all concept. The sole example of the EU underlines this: since the early days of integration, “crisis talk” regularly came up. If we are willing to speak about crises, we can also argue that in recent years the EU has struggled to a series of multiple and near-endless challenges that each have been termed “crises” – regarding the Eurozone, the question of migration, the Brexit vote as well as the Brexit procedure, and most recently the COVID-pandemic. These critical issues were accompanied by and/or have contributed to a questioning of the EU’s legitimacy, its governance structures, and the integration project itself, in order for academia to speak of a crisis of the EU altogether or even a “polycrisis”. These critical issues and the bespoke crises have generated their own literatures.
Transnational Governance and Human Rights
Duration: 2021-2024
Students, PhD candidates, and professors from six countries and four continents participate in the project "Transnational Governance and Human Rights". The project will expand the international network of the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Fulda University of Applied Sciences and establish long-lasting partnerships until the end of 2024. For this purpose, the department successfully attained a one million euro grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) from its funding programme UAS.International (HAW.International).
The project supports a variety of exchange programmes with six selected partner universities worldwide. These include the State University of New York (SUNY) in Cortland, USA, the MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada, the German Jordanian University in Amman, Jordan, the Birzeit University near Ramallah in Palestine, Sciences Po Toulouse in Southern France, and the University College London (UCL), UK.
It also strengthens the cooperation between academia and practice and establishes the “Fulda Centre of Transnational Governance” (CoG), which includes the MUN activities at Fulda. In addition to the internationalisation of studies and teaching, the project focuses on the development of an international research environment at Fulda University of Applied Sciences.
Fulda Centre of Transnational Governance
The Fulda Centre of Transnational Governance (CoG) aims at the transfer between academia and political practice, building on the Anglo-Saxon academic tradition and its “Schools of Governance”. The Centre builds cooperations with experts, politicians, and representatives of international and supranational organizations as well as business enterprises, NGOs and Think Tanks – ranging from representatives of the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Hessian state representation to the EU, to foreign trade chambers and companies.
The Fulda Centre of Transnational Governance bundles, systematises and professionalises these international collaborations and organises a programme of events and research, guest lectures and workshops by and with practitioners from transnational institutions. The international guests are integrated in teaching and research. The activities include curricula-relevant excursions (e.g. to Brussels, Luxembourg and Berlin), guest lectures, as well as teaching and research stays (incoming and outgoing).
Democratic Elite Perceptions of Economic and Monetary Union (D-EMU)
Duration: 01.09.2024 – 31.08.2026
The D-EMU project, funded under a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship, investigates how democratic elites perceive the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) of the EU. Led by Dr. Anja Thomas, this research seeks to understand the views and attitudes of political elites across Europe towards EMU reforms and the impact these perceptions have on EU policy-making processes, particularly in areas such as fiscal coordination and monetary stability.
PATRAPO
Duration: 01.03.2021 – 31.08.2023
Practising Transnational Politics (PATRAPO) is a project led by researchers from Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Autonomous University Madrid, and Zagreb University, with the associate partner Mac Ewan University, Edmonton. The project goal is to develop open access transnational teaching kits and a handbook for online blended learning seminars that train students for the participation in United Nations Model Games (MUN).
Based on previous experiences both in MUN and in EU projects, the partners will jointly develop, establish and implement the following elements in their universities, to be carried out in a yearly rhythm:
- a teaching kit for preparative joint blended MUN training seminars (1st semester of each academic year) at all participating institutions, including: teaching curricula, seminar plans, material, content, explanation, organization, training video collection
- a teaching kit for joint blended or real life MUN (2nd semester of each academic year) including: procedure, technical solutions, organizational advice, and detailed description of “how-to”
- a handbook including a manual (intellectual property of the partners) and user advice for third parties for the two teaching kits.
- four short time staff trainings: the project is a learning system including further training for teachers.
- blended student mobility sustains the attendance of virtual and life MUN.
Jean Monnet Chair
Duration: 01.09.2019 – 30.09.2023
The Jean Monnet Chair project “BridgE” of Prof. Dr. Claudia Wiesner has the thematic focus and aim to help bridging the gap between the European Union and its citizens by enhancing active debates on the EU. Despite the efforts of EU and national institutions as well as intermediate institutions and actors, research as well as opinion surveys diagnose a growing gap between what has been termed “EU elites” and EU citizens. The European Union has a legitimacy problem, support rates have been decreasing during the peak of the financial crisis, as the respective Eurobarometer data clearly show, and despite the economic situation improving, votes for populist, extremist, anti-EU and anti-democrat parties and movements are on the rise throughout the EU. At the same time, the Europeanisation of politics and decision making continues to impact and transform the national democratic systems of the member states.
The work programme for the Chair takes stock of this situation. The primary aim is to debate the EU with a) students and b) citizens that are neither engaged in EU-oriented civil-society organisations, nor in political parties, in order to bridge the gap between citizens and the EU.
In order to do so, teaching, citizen focus group discussions, public events, and research activities will be integrated. The results will deliver well-based findings about the sources of contemporary EU-criticism and be disseminated in public discussion events, academic conferences, and via publications directed at academics and EU practitioners in the sense of EU stakeholders, EU officials, and EU and national politicians. The work will help to bridge the gap between EU elites and average citizens.
In all this, a particular focus is set on MA students and young researchers, including them into the research process in teaching research seminars and additionally in offering them training courses in cooperation with Fulda Graduate School in the Social Sciences. The work plan of the Chair follows three objectives (Teaching and Debating Europe, Networking and Communication, Dissemination).
Jean Monnet OpenEUDebate Network
Date: 01.09.2018 – 30.09.2022
OpenEUdebate is Jean Monnet network composed of academic institutions (UAM, ULB, VUB, SNSPA) and of academic institutions and experts in EU politics and policies (Agenda Pública) co-financed by the EU Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). This network bridges academic and practical knowledge on EU policies to create a transnational bottom up dialogue on the EU. It intends to match EU’s policies with politics at the national level through a platform connecting the debate in the EU institutions and transnational civil society platforms with national publics by connecting existing knowledge on EU issues with the growing demand for evidence-based debates. The network works with opinion leaders, think tanks, academics and civil society organisations of all political tendencies who share the need to connect analysis and policy to renew public debate on Europe in different member states.