The Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. A historical and sociological study of science (1978-2020)

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The project will examine the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Wiko). The Wiko is one of the world's most renowned Institutes for Advanced Study (IAS) and is intended to offer selected top scientists the opportunity to give their own thinking a new direction beyond the disciplinary segmentation of everyday university life. The fellows should be free from all exploitation interests and success constraints and even be allowed to fail. From the beginning, the Kolleg was intended to undermine disciplinary boundaries, the difference between science and art, and national research traditions by inviting scholars from all disciplines, artists, and fellows from the former Eastern Bloc, Africa, Asia, and South America. The founding history of the Wiko since 1978 in the specific scientific situation of the late 1970s and 1980s (mass university, critique of elite thinking, beginning of the discourse on excellence) will be reconstructed and the position of the college in the West German and international scientific landscape will be determined more precisely. In the main part, on the basis of files, memoirs, interviews and the work reports of the fellows, it will be examined what scientific practice at the Wiko was and is like. The Wiko appears as a hub of the scientific community: the stay is deliberately designed as a break with university routines and is intended to change them as a result. In longitudinal section, a transformation of the habitus and self-image of scientists since the 1980s becomes apparent. The Wiko can also be interpreted as a symptom of a crisis in the science system, which has come under increasing criticism due to bureaucratization, specialization, overcrowding, and the intensified global competition in science that was already emerging when the Wiko was founded. Therefore, this IAS offers an ideal case study in the history of science in order to be able to examine in detail the multifaceted and complex structural change of science in post-war Germany concentrated on an eccentrically positioned institution.