Understanding Complexity and Crises

Key Ideas of Global Multiplicity
 

Confronting the challenges of our complex twenty-first-century social worlds means engaging with multiplicity: the tensions between different – and often competing or seemingly incompatible – social realities, worldviews, forms of knowledge, and approaches to the future. The central problems and current crises that the world faces today all have multiple dimensions and intersect with other problems in complex ways; they can thus only be addressed through multifaceted measures. These challenges range from climate change to health crises; they are concerned with the long-term consequences of colonial domination, growing social inequalities, chronic war and conflict, new geopolitics, and the slow violence of environmental degradation. While these challenges are universal, their effects vary depending on the specific contexts where they occur. This means that understanding and addressing them requires grounding in local knowledge and contexts from a people-centred approach.

The empirical foundation of our endeavour is ethnography, a research method based on immersive and detailed observation of social phenomena. Ethnography allows us to gain deep insights into the lived experiences, beliefs, practices, and interactions of individuals and communities. At the same time, we also believe in pushing the boundaries of methodology and experimenting with a dynamic mix of ethnographic and other empirical methods and sources such as statistical data, archival material, mass media, and online communications. Using these various approaches to understand the entangled complexities and nuances of people’s social worlds, this research school strives to train the next generation of researchers to engage with global multiplicity as a basis for developing strategies to address contemporary challenges.

By bringing together anthropologically oriented scholars with diverse research topics and backgrounds, this school creates a much-needed synergy to study contemporary issues such as climate change, the digital revolution, the crises of modernity, and questions of justice and equality. Our goal is to make the IMPRS “Global Multiplicity” into a globally renowned consortium for exceptional postgraduate education in anthropology and anthropologically engaged research across various disciplines, including law, sociology, and history. By focusing on developing on a profound understanding of plurality, the IMPRS enables doctoral researchers to gain insights into multiple perspectives and ways of living. The exploration of complex entanglements and different forms of agency helps researchers to deepen their understanding of both historical trajectories and current challenges.