UniReport

There are places no one will ever visit, simply because they don’t exist in our everyday reality. Mathematicians in the research project CRC/TRR 326 GAUS explore such places daily: they investigate fascinating objects that can neither be touched nor drawn and that no one can truly imagine. To make this possible, they must get creative and approach these inaccessible objects through something they can grasp: they construct models of the objects, study the resulting structures, and, through this indirect method, uncover the properties of the original forms – properties they could never have identified directly.

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.

The German Research Foundation’s (DFG) Research Training Group “Standards of Governance” is an interdisciplinary research initiative run jointly by TU Darmstadt and Goethe University Frankfurt. At the midterm conference held in late January in Frankfurt, international experts joined members of the Research Training Group to discuss how standards both shape international politics and themselves become subjects of negotiation and conflict. Prof. Sandra Seubert, a political scientist at Goethe University Frankfurt and co-spokesperson for the Research Training Group, reflects on the conference and on future research questions.

University President Enrico Schleiff on Jürgen Habermas

On March 14, 2026, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Jürgen Habermas passed away at the age of 96 at his home in Starnberg. Goethe University mourns the loss of its most influential philosopher and one of the most important instructors in its history.