Projects

Sustainable Cooperation – Roadmaps to Resilience (SCOOP)

Cooperation is key to resilient families, communities, and organizations. Through cooperation, individuals can realize benefits they cannot achieve on their own. But why do some cooperative arrangements decline, whereas others remain impressively stable and thrive? Will our current cooperative arrangements remain effective when confronted with major societal transformations, like population aging, mass migration, and the digital revolution? Integrating the expertise of sociologists, psychologists, historians and philosophers, SCOOP investigates novel solutions to enhance sustainable cooperation in the domains of care, work, and inclusion. An innovative mixed-method research design assesses their effectiveness and delivers evidence-based policy advice. Several members of the PPE Centre are involved in projects in SCOOP.

Please see this list of all SCOOP PhD projects, which include some supervised by PPE Centre members.

DemoFutures. Democracy and its futures – between governance and counter-publics.

DemoFutures analyzes current trends and possible futures of democracy, bringing together perspectives from sociological theory and political philosophy in a critical perspective. Citizens experience an “erosion crisis” of democratic practices and institutions. One of the factors behind it is the increasingly powerful logic of governance, which is superimposed upon, and often replaces, democratic forms of decision-making. Nonetheless, we can also observe public mobilization, criticism and protest. They lead to the development of critical publics off the beaten tracks of the dominant public space. The deliberation that take places within these spaces offers the potential to turn into counter-publics, in which alternative futures can be imagined. The project develops an interdisciplinary account in which these two perspectives are intertwined, and analyzes “exemplary cases” from France and Germany in a comparative perspective.

PI in Groningen: Prof. Dr. Lisa Herzog, postdoc: Dr. Just Serrano Zamora.