Research Approach

Societies are always in motion. Societies are characterized by an orderly social organization. Understanding and shaping societies always involves a contradiction between change/transformation and stability/order. So social change is always an opportunity and a conflict at the same time. Based on this basic insight, sustainable social change should be researched taking into account the following four dimensions

Transdisciplinarity and justice

A central premise is that any design of social change is only necessary with the involvement of all actors when problems and topics are defined - namely all age groups (transdisciplinary research). We also assume that not all people want to or can actively participate in a social transformation at all times - for reasons of social equality and justice, the INGW tries to initiate advocacy research in order to include as many voices as possible from those addressed and affected in the discourse about a “big one “Transformation” to represent. 

Reflexivity and criticism

Knowledge and insights are only generated through an integrative perspective that combines structure and culture. Every society can be represented in material structural data (power, property, economic performance, etc.) and is usually justified and accepted by normative cultural understandings. It can be assumed that social structure analysis can empirically show injustice and social inequality that conflict with cultural self-images. Social inequality and social justice are driving conditions that must be overcome. Every research activity in the INGW attaches great importance to critically questioning its own knowledge and insight production in relation to its own social impact.

Change means learning

Social movements as well as social orders are preceded by learning, upbringing and educational processes of people and groups. The focus of the INGW is therefore the investigation of individual pedagogical and collective socio-educational learning, upbringing and educational processes in relation to the change in cultural (self-)understandings, whereby the insight-leading perspective represents the increase in individual and collective self-determination in democratic-political concepts of order . For example, questions of individual motivation as well as questions about collective learning blocks in relation to social change and sustainability can be brought into focus.

Acting for a new era

Sustainability means turning assumptions about the future into starting points for concrete action in the present.

The core of all sustainability-related thinking, speaking and acting depends on people's ability to transcend the “real” and move in the “space of possibilities”. Vision, utopias, dystopias, ideals, worldviews and beliefs are expressions of a “social imagination” that still lacks the experience of a concrete everyday life. Social imaginations must penetrate the everyday world and become symbols, texts, images, plans or maps so that they can guide action and stabilize themselves in routines. The INGW is also interested in these transformations

The INGW accompanies sustainable and social change, taking these four dimensions into account, along the continuum theory - practice and individual - collective.