News

Two SOCIUM researchers participating in a EU Horizon 2024 project.

The two SOCIUM researchers Sebastian Haunss and Sophia Hunger have been grated a three-year project funded within the EU Horizon 2024 framework. The project will start on January 1st 2025 and also involve University of Bremen researcher Heiko Pleines from the Research Centre for East European Studies.
The goal of the project is a comprehensive comparative analysis of the role of various actors whose actions might affect the patterns of protest culture.
 
Major research objectives:
  • Protesters/activists’ repertoires and framing in the countries with different quality of democracy in the context of ongoing de-democratization processes
  • Authorities’ instrumentalization of the institutional and discursive mechanisms (“hard” and “soft” measures) to challenge protest culture in the target countries;
  • The role of mainstream and social media – their mediation and agency – in triggering or challenging protest culture in the target countries;
  • Citizens’ role in protest culture in the target countries via focusing on the perceptions and practices of three generations
  • Trace the influence of the current patterns of protest culture on the state of democracy in the target countries

Currenty the project is looking for a PhD student (see job advert here)

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Sebastian Haunss
SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 7
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58572
E-Mail: sebastian.haunss@uni-bremen.de

Prof. Dr. Sophia Hunger
SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 5
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58579
E-Mail: hunger@uni-bremen.de

Project form Prof. Haunss publishes new data platform

Who protests when, where and about what issue? While election results and population surveys are widely available, this is usually not the case for data on protest dynamics in Germany. Yet valid scientific information on who protests, when, on what issues and with which means is of crucial importance for journalists, civil society and the interested public in order to be able to understand current protest events.
Against this background, Prof. Dr. Sebastian Haunss form the SOCIUM, together with other researchers from the Institute for Protest and Social Movement Studies (ipb) have developed an easy-to-use and freely accessible online platform on which systematically collected data on protest events in Germany can be processed and made available to the public. The platform protestdata.eu  contains information on protest campaigns and protest actions from 1950 to 2002 throughout Germany as well as in 18 German cities between 2009 and 2020.

 

protestdata.eu is a joint project of the Research Institute for Social Cohesion (FGZ) and the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM). Teams at both institutions are researching the temporal and thematic development of local protest. The idea to visualise the data for a broader public arose from the ongoing cooperation in a working group at the Institute for Protest and Social Movement Studies, to which all participants are associated.

 

For questions about the online platform, please contact: fgz.protest@uni-bremen.de.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Sebastian Haunss
SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 7
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58572
E-Mail: sebastian.haunss@uni-bremen.de

Fridays for Future – Die Jugend gegen den Klimawandel. Konturen der weltweiten Protestbewegung

Fridays for Future was successfull where environmental NGOs and climate protests in the 20 years before failed. They have succeeded to alter the issue of climate change from a relatively abstract topic that is negotiated at international conferences to one that mobilizes tens of thousands of people to protest on the streets. In the six months before the Corona pandemic, according to opinion polls, climate change had become the top most important issue in Germany. With Fridays for Future, climate protests have gained unprecedented popular support and political attention.
But who actually participates in this social movement? What motivates people to protest and what are the attitudes and convictions of the protesters? Sebastian Haunss (head of the working group Social Conflicts at SOCIUM) and Moritz Sommer (Institute for Research on Social Movements and Protest) have published the first comprehensive scientific study on this new wave of climat protests. Several surveys among protesters from 2019 create the starting point for the analyses in the book »Fridays for Future – Die Jugend gegen den Klimawandel. Konturen der weltweiten Protestbewegung«.
In twelve chapters, the 28 authors of the book provide insights into decision-making and mobilization structures of local Fridays for Future groups, analyze reactions to the protests in the media, politics and society, and examine the attitudes of adolescents and young adults to climate change issues. The individual chapters offer a broad audience access to the first research findings on Fridays for Future. The book is available in print in bookstores and online as an open access version (https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5347-2).


Contact:
Prof. Dr. Sebastian Haunss
SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 7
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58572
E-Mail: sebastian.haunss@uni-bremen.de

MARDY: Modeling ARgumentation DYnamics in Political Discourse.

The German Research Foundation has granted Sebastian Haunss a research project within the Priority Programme "Robust Argumentation Machines (RATIO)" (SPP 1999). Under the heading »Modeling ARgumentation DYnamics in Political Discourse (MARDY)« the project aims to develop a framework for data-driven modeling of key aspects of argumentation dynamics in policy debates.

Within the next three years Sebastian Haunss will cooperate with the two computer scientists and computer linguists Jonas Kuhn and Sebastian Padó from the Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung at the University of Stuttgart.

Further Information about the project:
Modeling ARgumentation DYnamics in Political Discourse (MARDY)


Contact:
Prof. Dr. Sebastian Haunss
SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 7
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58572
E-Mail: sebastian.haunss@uni-bremen.de