Following the recommendation of the German Council of Science and Humanities, the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony has decided to further develop the research capabilities of the humanities. Among other things, six Georg Gottfried Gervinus Fellowships have been established to expand international research relations, in the context of which an internationally renowned scientist will be involved in the structured supervision of young academics and hold a Gervinus Lecture for one semester.

The Carl von Ossietzky University has successfully applied for a Georg Gottfried Gervinus Fellowship for Prof Dr Jürgen Streeck. As part of the fellowship, he will be assigned to the DFG Research Training Group 1608/1 Self-Education and will be involved in the supervision of the fellows.

Mr Streeck will conduct several workshops to support the fellows on their path of self-education to become active in the academic field (but also in other academic appointments). The fellows will participate in current research, help shape research processes and take on corresponding research tasks in order to ultimately make the results of their research accessible to interested third parties (the scientific community and the public).

Personal homepage of Prof Dr Jürgen Streeck

Prof Dr Jürgen Streeck will hold the Gervinus Lecture in the summer (2013) and winter (2013-2014) semesters. The lecture series is open to the university public, in particular the humanities, cultural studies and social sciences, and is entitled

"The communicating body"

Abstract by Prof Dr Jürgen Streeck:

This is a lecture on the social intelligence, expressive richness and world-making power of the human body. We explore the bodily means and practices by which people orientate themselves in the world, communicate about it and manage their interactions, co-operations and institutions: gestures, gazes, postures and other forms of "multimodal" communication. We observe how body movements and speech are coordinated; we familiarise ourselves with the variety of communicative and cognitive tasks that are solved with hand gestures; and we see how work processes and communicative action are intertwined. Our micro-ethnographic observations and analyses will be deepened by excursions and reflections of various kinds: on the representation of the communicating body in the visual arts; the role of gesture in music; historical and cultural varieties of bodily habitus; and the debate on the body within contemporary cognitive science, anthropology, linguistics and philosophy.