sozialwissenschaften

Außerdem: Künstliche Intelligenz - Wirklich gefährlich für uns? (08:22) // Mehr spannende Themen wissenschaftlich eingeordnet findet ihr hier: www.quarks.de // Kritik, Fragen? Schreibt uns! --> quarksdaily@wdr.de Von Yvonne Stürwing.

Die Hochschulen der angewandten Wissenschaften von Wien, Zürich und München haben sich für eine intensive Zusammenarbeit und Austausch als INUAS vernetzt. Ein wichtiges Feld der Sozialforschung ist in allen Hochschulen die Stadt und daher entstand die Idee, sich mit urbanen Transformationen in einer Serie von Konferenzen zu beschäftigen.

Mit dem Wiener Konferenzthema „Wohnen unter Druck. Dynamiken zwischen Zentren und Peripherien“ begibt sich das Netzwerk auf die Suche nach neuen Perspektiven von sozialem Wohnen und nachhaltiger Entwicklung. Durch den inter- bzw. transdisziplinär aufgesetzten Dialog über alle Studiengänge hinweg können gegenwärtige Herausforderungen in wachsenden Städten und Regionen mit besonderem Blick auf Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten und Innovationspotenziale diskutiert werden.

In unserem Gespräch mit den Organisatoren Isabel Glogar und Marc Diebäcker beleuchten wir einige dieser Aspekte und diskutieren diese vor allem im Hinblick auf die Wiener Situation.

Die Konferenz findet vom 4 bis 6. November 2019 statt.

The political debate about the role of business in armed conflicts has increasingly raised expectations as to governance contributions by private corporations in the fields of conflict prevention, peace-keeping and postconflict peace-building. This political agenda seems far ahead of the research agenda, in which the negative image of business in conflicts, seen as fuelling, prolonging and taking commercial advantage of violent conflicts,still prevails. So far the scientific community has been reluctant to extend the scope of research on ‘corporate social responsibility’ to the area of security in general and to intra-state armed conflicts in particular. As a consequence, there is no basis from which systematic knowledge can be generated about the conditions and the extent to which private corporations can fulfil the role expected of them in the political discourse. The research on positive contributions of private corporations to security amounts to unconnected in-depth case studies of specific corporations in specific conflict settings. Given this state of research, we develop a framework for a comparative research agenda to address the question: Under which circumstances and to what extent can private corporations be expected to contribute to public security?

In a series of three studies, we investigated the validity of implicit theories that the German public holds regarding Muslims. German participants expected Muslims to be more aggressive than Christians, and therefore be more supportive of terrorism than Christians. Furthermore, Muslims were assumed to be more intrinsically religious and to hold a stronger identity with their religion than Christians (Study 1). However, self-asessment surveys of Muslims and Christians in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS: ex-Soviet Union) revealed that Muslims were not more aggressive, more intrinsically religious, or more supportive of terrorism than Christians. In contrast, Muslims reported a stronger religious identification than Christians(Study 2). Correspondingly, threat to religious identity was found to affect only Muslims’, but not Christians’, attitudes toward terrorism conducted by outgroup perpetrators. In contrast to Germans’ implicit theories regarding Muslims, it was the importance of religious identity and not increased aggression potential that mediated this effect (Study 3).

The trafficking of women and girls for the purpose of sexual exploitation has reportedly been booming in Europe since the 1990s. Governments, international organizations, and private actors have addressed the causes and consequences of sex trafficking in various ways. This article shows that the concept of security governance helps to understand efforts against human trafficking and their shortcomings. The anti-trafficking security governance system consists of five approaches: legal measures, prosecution, protection, prevention in countries of origin, and prevention in countries of destination. Although progress has been made, the security governance system is marked by several pathologies, especially a lack of programs that prevent trafficking in countries of origin and destination, insufficient protection for trafficked persons, and deficient networks bringing together the various actors involved in anti-trafficking. To make governance against human trafficking more effective, efficient, and just, the security governance system must be better balanced and networked.

In Germany, the precautionary principle (PP) is a well-established legal principle in environmental law, especially for regulating agribiotechnology. This article uses the analytical concept of issue-framing to identify different views of the PP and how they have informed changes in the German regulatory arena. In the 1990s Germany’s genetically modified (GM) crop policy was dominated by a discourse of innovation and international competitiveness, combined with narrow accounts of precaution. In the early 2000s, agro-biotechnology became subject to changes in the risk regulatory system, new agricultural policies and a broader precautionary scope. After the BSE crisis, German policy promoted sustainable agriculture and organic food, combined with the demand for a precautionary consumer policy and ‘consumer choice’. Precaution now encompasses comprehensive mandatory labelling and liability rules to protect non-GM food production from GM ‘contamination’ in fields and across the food chain.

Analysing the practice of pension sharing, this article looks at social and cultural dimensions of ageing in an urban African residential area, Cape Town's Khayelitsha. First, the paper discusses pension sharing as a futureoriented security strategy. Many older Africans in Khayelitsha believe that if they do not share their pensions with their kin, they do not have much chance of being helped in times of need. Pension sharing as an instrumental act is rooted in the perceived underdevelopment of the state social security system on the one hand, and in the very character of African kinship and the ¯uidity of today's urban domestic units on the other. Partly triggered by poverty and mass unemployment, African pensioners are under severe normative pressure to share their grants within their families. Taking into account African notions of old age and of personhood, and considering the widespread devaluation of older Africans in social constructions, pension sharing provides older Africans with an (easily available) means by which they can earn (self-)respect. Further, state policies indirectly enhance the normative pressure on pensioners to share their old-age pensions. On a symbolic plane the practice may be construed as a political model that conceptualises duty as the inner bond of the social world. In conclusion, it is propounded that the concept of (intergenerational) reciprocity is inadequate to account for pension sharing or practical provision of old-age care.

Adopting a constructivist approach, individual constructions of the concept of human nature were investigated by using an 'adulthood interview' and culturally adapted dilemma stories. Subjects were young adults with higher education, including university students and individuals already in work from the US, Indonesia, Japan and Korea. The central hypothesis that subjects from different cultures conceptualize similar structures of understanding human nature at different levels of complexity was clearly confirmed. A second complementary hypothesis assumed that subjects from eastern cultures emphasize a more collective and interdependent identity compared with US subjects. Content analysis revealed that all subjects from eastern cultures elaborated characteristics of interdependency that were viewed as crucial for human nature, while US subjects emphasized aspects of individuality and independence. However, without exception, eastern subjects also simultaneously stressed autonomous identity. Conflict resolutions resulting from contradictions between independent and interdependent identity are described by examples from Indonesia (parent-child conflict) and Japan (self-other conflict). Finally, a combination of universal structural levels and of a culturally shaped conception of identity is suggested, assuming that the interdependent self, more pronounced in eastern cultures, and independent identities, more elaborated in western cultures, are conceived at different structural levels of increasing complexity that show universal characteristics.