Culture & Societal Change

The Scientific Area Committee IV is a pillar of the DRESDEN-concept initiative. It coordinates the collaboration between the TU Dresden School of Humanities and Social Sciences and non-university research institutions in Dresden.

As a central point of contact and facilitator, SAC IV supports the cooperation in joint projects at the levels of research, teaching, transfer and infrastructure.

Mission Statement

We see ourselves as a platform for networking and regular exchange with the aim of providing a workable structure and basis for joint project plans, and thus also increasing the visibility of our institutions. The cooperation should help to identify common topics, to work out funding and financing possibilities and to open up unifying planning perspectives. Due to our special expertise, we are united by a common educational and research mission at the interface between culture, science and society, which has endured as a unified framework, especially due to the societal challenges of recent years and despite the plurality of institutions. In doing so, we see ourselves as always open to cooperation within the entire DRESDEN-concept network.

Sustainability, openness to the world and democracy are for us building blocks for a sustainable society as well as components of our own institutional practice. A Sustainable and diversity-sensitive organizational development not only serves as a role model; we understand it explicitly as a socio-political and cultural-political course setting – especially in Saxony and beyond.

In the context of the climate crisis, sustainability as a topic and contested term is of particular importance. It is necessary to understand the history and the current handling of our environment, to find suitable terms and concepts, and thus to carry out educational work, as well as to focus on possibilities of implementing sustainability as the most urgent requirement of the present. As never before, we are experiencing and shaping transformation processes that not only involve technical developments, but also have an impact on problems affecting society as a whole and require research and communication support, for example, the challenge of both global and small-scale migration in border regions.

Such transformation processes refer to both the understanding and the handling of democracy (education). Regional debates on migration, pandemic and climate policy, the rise of right-wing populist movements and authoritarian developments in some Western democracies are forcing a renewed and far-reaching debate on the value of democratically based political judgment and action. The processes of digitalization play a special role in this regard. The aforementioned topics are also the focus of the disruption research and the chair of Digital Cultures at the TU Dresden.

As a regional alliance, local and regional processes of change are particularly close to our hearts in the context of the aforementioned key topics. Structural change in Lusatia, demographic change in Saxony as a whole, and structural, cultural and political differences between urban and rural areas are of particular interest and will shape project work in the coming years.

Our institutions are all faced with the task of rethinking the forms of project and mediation work practiced to date. In the future, we want to focus more on local and participatory formats so that our partner institutions continue to be perceived and also used as spaces of the societal public. It is therefore also important to include those who have been reached little or not at all by previous offerings. The transfer between science, culture and society is a task for all of us, which we can master more efficiently with joint strategies. For this reason, too, we are very open to the addition of new partner institutions from Dresden and, if possible, also beyond the region.