The current reappraisal of the colonial heritage of numerous disciplines and the growing, often justified criticism of a mono-paradigmatic orientation of certain departments show the necessity of a more systematic examination of their own histories, ethical responsibilities and philosophical foundations.
Due to both, the size of individual departments and the breadth of disciplines represented, many different scientific paradigms exist at our university. We want to systematically bring these different approaches into conversation with one another and promote a critical engagement among the departments with their historical, ethical, and methodological foundations as well as their contributions and references to larger social questions in teaching and research.
In our work, we refer to the numerous existing activities and plans in medical ethics, philosophy, educational sciences, subject didactics, physics and computer science, among others. The treatment of history and social significance of one’s own subject can be advanced jointly by subject sciences and subject didactics and thus also lead to a new quality of cooperation between these fields. A close connection with the numerous initiatives for critical appraisal of the colonial past, both of the scientific disciplines in general and of our university in particular, is obvious. This covers in particular the collaboration with the network Decolonizing Academia.
The 2023 seminar series “Social and environmental implications of developing new technologies – quantum computing and beyond” will finally bridge the two fields in the Interdisciplinary Forum by discussing Science Theory and Dual Use aspects in an application driven setup.