Welcome to the Faculty of Social Sciences

When anti-democratic aspirations and contempt for humanity become popular in the public and political sphere, the boundaries of what can be said and done shift. They normalize intolerance, extremism and ideas and enemy stereotypes based on exclusion. Academic freedom and social cohesion can then be threatened. Do we want to accept such developments without objection? All members of the faculty and their cooperation partners, including those at the learning location Praxis, are called upon to stimulate discourse on this and to stand up for our principles of democratic (co)existence.

There is still no democracy worthy of its name.
Democracy is still in the making: it still has to be created or renewed, regenerated.
^{- Jacques Derrida (1991) -}

The Faculty of Social Sciences is committed to a democratic way of living, working and studying together. This applies to cooperation in teaching, research and transfer activities and all related contexts, including at the place of learning practice, as well as to everyday interaction. Against the backdrop of current socio-political developments, this basis is particularly (challenging). The "Democracy and Diversity" working group was founded at the 2023 closed meeting and has been working on a policy paper on democratic (co)life at the Faculty of Social Sciences since the beginning of 2024.

In the spirit of strengthening joint responsibility and democratic participation processes, the paper was initially presented to the Faculty's employees for discussion and criticism in April 2024. This was followed in May 2024 by a participation format for students as part of the "Demokratie verspielt?! revisited" afternoon. The criticisms collected in both formats were examined by the members of the "Democracy and Diversity" working group for translation into a policy paper and incorporated into it. The paper is fundamentally 'in the making' and will be continuously updated in an effort to put it into practice. Click here for our principles.