Society & Transfer - News

Science-Policy Dialogue at Goethe University Frankfurt and upcoming Environmental Ministers’ Conference focus on organized environmental crime and the illicit trade in fluorinated greenhouse gases.

Religions look beyond the visible world. However, most believers also look to them for help with everyday problems. In Christian Europe, these hopes were long realized in “spiritual home remedies”: Compiled without fixed rules, they contained—well into the 20th century—religious and religion-inspired objects that were believed to provide relief from both physical and emotional suffering. 

Innovative ideas for a more sustainable future took center stage yesterday at the grand finale of the Goethe SDG Contest 2026 at Goethe University Frankfurt. Six finalist teams pitched their concepts to an audience of around 100 guests from academia, industry, and the startup ecosystem after emerging from an intensive bootcamp involving 12 selected projects. Organized by Goethe Unibator in partnership with Santander Germany, the competition supports entrepreneurial approaches that advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

On April 29, the discussion series “Frankfurt School” will continue at the cinema of the German Film Institute & Film Museum (DFF). The panel discussion with film scholar Gertrud Koch and journalist Bert Rebhandl will explore the question of whether the concept of “culture industry” is still relevant today and how it can be interpreted within the context of digital and global media landscapes.

Knowledge is not neutral. It emerges within specific social contexts, is shared, transformed, and translated—and is always shaped by power dynamics. In a time when critical knowledge and critical sciences are increasingly under political pressure, it is worth taking a closer look at the contact zones where dominant and critical knowledge intersect: Who is allowed to be recognized as knowledgeable in certain spaces? Which experiences are heard, which are overlooked or silenced? These questions are more urgent today than ever before, not only within academia but also beyond it. The Cornelia Goethe Colloquium series therefore extends its focus to education, literature, and journalism.

With Jürgen Habermas, we have lost a scholar without equal and a committed public intellectual who shaped the humanities and social sciences worldwide over many decades. In a lecture at Goethe University Frankfurt marking his 90th birthday, he spoke of three especially happy periods of academic life spent there. Even after his retirement, he remained an active participant in many discussions organized by the Research Centre Normative Orders, and his work was a constant point of reference for our own research. We have lost our most important academic mentor, with whom we remained closely and warmly connected over the years.

Emotions play a decisive role in shaping the political culture of democracy. Israeli-French sociologist Eva Illouz has explored in several widely discussed works – including The Emotional Life of Populism: How Fear, Disgust, Resentment, and Love Undermine Democracy and Explosive Emotions: How Modern Society Shapes What We Feel – how fear, resentment, anxiety, disgust, and love emerge from social conditions and influence democracy. In her keynote at the joint annual workshop of the new German Research Foundation (DFG) Research Training Group “Aesthetics of Democracy" and Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften's research focus “Democratic Vistas", she revisits this subject – this time with a focus on an emotion that sparks particularly intense debate in Germany: guilt.

Social media is firmly embedded in the lives of young people. Platforms like TikTok are where they explore societal, religious, and ideological questions and engage in debates. But how can young people be empowered to use TikTok in ways that make their horizons visible? And what challenges come with this?

From linguistic landscapes to football conversations and skateboarding subcultures, students from Goethe University Frankfurt and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz are applying their training in real-world contexts. A field excursion to Mombasa offered hands-on research experience in one of East Africa’s most linguistically diverse settings.

“Bliss” and “Ossian”: these are the two keywords outlining the thematic areas explored by the two scholars who have won the Klaus Heyne Award for Research in German Romanticism at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2026. The philosopher and theologian Dr Kirill Chepurin receives the award for his monograph “Bliss against the World: Schelling, Theodicy, and the Crisis of Modernity” (published with Oxford University Press in 2024), while the art historian Dr Elisabeth Ansel receives the award for her essay, “Ossianic images and visual translation processes in J.M.W. Turner and Carl Gustav Carus” (published with Manchester University Press in 2025 in a volume entitled “Picturing the Romantic: New Perspectives on European Romanticism(s) in the Visual Arts”).

On February 4, 2026, the renowned Frankfurt ornithologist and physiologist Prof. Dr. Roland Prinzinger passed away at the age of 77, completely unexpectedly for many of us. With his passing, we lose a passionate biologist with outstanding expertise in species knowledge, which he shared with great commitment with students and interested laypeople—through countless excursions, lectures, and numerous publications, including academic articles and textbooks.

U3L once again offers a wide range of topics with a high degree of flexibility: many courses can also be attended online.