Writing is one of humanity’s central cultural techniques. Over millennia, it has shaped societies and survived every social and technological revolution. The significance of handwriting is not limited to the content of what is written; it is also revealed in the materials used, writing tools, contexts of use, and the manner in which written artefacts are processed, passed on, and preserved. Inscribed stone tablets, palm-leaf manuscripts, papyrus rolls, medieval codices, graffiti — the diversity of artefacts reflects the wide range of functions that handwriting has fulfilled and continues to fulfil in daily life.

The promise of human rights to protect people everywhere from abuses and injustices and to enable them to live in equal dignity remains unfulfilled for most of the world’s population despite the growth of human rights instruments, institutions, and organizations. Furthermore, skepticism in academic discourses and the open rejection of human rights by many states and political actors are on the rise.

Societies worldwide are undergoing rapid transformations, and technology plays a crucial yet ambiva-lent role in these transformations – as seen in recent debates about artificial intelligence, neurotech-nologies, and autonomous systems. Despite its centrality, technology often remains peripheral in the portfolio of social science disciplines, with many theories neglecting technology as an explicit or essen-tial factor. Theories of justice and democracy, for instance, often treat their core concerns as if they were separable from technology and innovation. Simultaneously, major technology development ef-forts often regard social science as an afterthought. This disconnect leaves us ill-equipped to address interconnected global challenges, growing distrust in technologies and experts, and the transformative impact of technologies on our lives.

The goal of The Adaptive Mind is to transform our scientific understanding of how humans adapt to changing conditions. Our results will not only answer one of the deepest questions in the sciences of the mind, but also open new avenues for individualised approaches to mental health, and the creation of robust, human-aligned artificial intelligence systems. Adaptability is possibly the most remarkable feature of the human mind.

The Cluster of Excellence 2020 "Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective" aims to create a new theoretical and methodological take on literature in a global perspective that moves beyond the categories of nation and period and conceives of literature instead as a transcultural and transtemporal phenomenon in deep time.

The liberal model of society is under increasing pressure worldwide. Authoritarian and illiberal states, as well as violent non-state actors, pose serious challenges to liberal democracies from the outside. From within, populist movements and parties claim to uphold liberal values while simultaneously contesting their meaning, thereby fueling extremism, eroding trust in institutions, and deepening social polarization.

Our Cluster of Excellence explores the deep roots of social, environmental, and cultural phenomena and processes that substantially marked past human development. In doing so, ROOTS helps to explain the long-term development of connectivities and to understand how they continue to have an impact today.

The Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics. Dynamics of Tradition and Innovation” at the University of Münster has been investigating the complex relationship between religion and politics across epochs and cultures since 2007. The 140 researchers from 10 countries and more than 20 disciplines in the humanities and social sciences are particularly concerned in the funding phase from 2019 to 2025 with the “dynamics of tradition and innovation”.

The Cluster »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« aims to create a basis for a new culture of materials. The central vision of the Cluster is to rediscover the analog in the activity of images, spaces and materials in the age of the digital.

The Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” investigates how political pro-cesses create, reinforce, or reduce social inequalities. By examining the interplay of perception, participation, and policy, we explore the dynamics of inequality in democ-racies and non-democracies around the world.

A functioning society requires not only rules, procedures and institutions, but also shared ideas, narratives and images. The social practices of sharing these ideas, narratives and images constitute what we call ‘social imagining’. It involves the creation of communally distributed, intersubjectively recognised imaginaries that provide orientation and stability in everyday life.

The 21st century is an exciting time in human origins research. Rapid methodological advances have revolutionized the study of fossil and archaeological remains, while surprising discoveries have overturned the status quo and upended long-established assumptions. We now know that multiple hominin species, representing a previously unimaginable diversity of human relatives, not only co-existed in time and space, but also interbred repeatedly, questioning traditional definitions of species.

ECONtribute’s goal is to break new ground in the analysis of markets & public policy. Motivated by pressing societal challenges, ECONtribute has advanced a new perspective in the first funding period by incorporating manifold ways of human thinking and acting into analyses of markets and policies. This includes drawing on notions of fairness, social preferences, beliefs, and expectations to explain market behavior, guide effective market and policy design, and the development of tools to assess the distributive implications of policies.

The Cluster of Excellence "Cross-Cultural Philology" explores philological practices and cultural dynamics across a period of 5,000 years through a cross-cultural approach. Its focus lies on the rich philological traditions of the Near and Middle East, East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, North, East, and West Africa, and Europe. The aim is to identify similarities and differences, continuities and discontinuities, yielding insights far beyond the current state of the art.

The Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) investigates well-known forms of de-pendency – such as Roman, transatlantic or Mamluk slavery, forced labor and debt bondage – as well as less visible forms, such as human trafficking and domestic servitude.

Founded on more than forty years of experience at the University of Bayreuth in conducting Africa-focused research, the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence is designed to develop new responses to the theoretical, methodological and structural challenges facing African Studies. Since its inception in 2019, Africa Multiple has spearheaded innovative approaches and forms of collaborative research, with the objective of reconfiguring African Studies on both the conceptual and the structural level.