

Headline:
Perceptions, Values, Orientation
Researchers in the area "Perceptions, Values, Orientation" reconstruct and generate orientation and transformation knowledge aimed at the individual and societal levels. Working across a range of topics, this research area explores the relationship between individuals, societies, and politics. What normative requirements can be distilled from the call for more sustainable lifestyles and governance structures to shape human behaviour? Throughout society, ideas (imaginaries), rhetorical structures (narratives) and values come to bear of which the respective actors themselves are frequently unaware. These imaginaries and narratives convey ideas about desirable futures, perceptions of conflicts, or fundamental views about the general nature of societal transformation. They feed into and shape (political) institutions, in turn eliciting analogous behaviour among individuals. This process also informs the development of strategies that are intended to address sustainability challenges, but which frequently reproduce ideas and values that are inconsistent with action for sustainable development. This research area seeks to render these largely subconscious ideas visible and to reflect upon their potential to foster or hinder change. The research group "Narratives and Images of Sustainability" analyses social-scientific discourse and undertakes art-based accompanying research, with the aim of reconstructing the collective narrative patterns that determine current discourse, and considers how these patterns might be modified to better serve democratic transformations towards sustainable development. Researchers in the group "Politicizing the Future" analyse contemporary future practices with respect to their potential to envisage and facilitate the evolution of open and sustainable futures. The researcher group "A Mindset for the Anthropocene" develops practical processes and resources that enable individuals and actors to reflect upon and transform mental paradigms in order to develop more sustainable strategies for action.