Creative Challenges of Open Societies

We live in a time full of exciting and partly also threatening challenges - their main terms are "climate change", "digitalization", "globalization" etc.. There are no ready-made solutions for all these future issues; instead, they must be sought and found in open and interdisciplinary discourse with one another. But this open discourse is not always easy. Since unresolved crises also trigger fears, quite a few people tend to retard or persist in pre-modern, non-open, but ideologically closed forms. This also affects relevant segments of the population in all modern European democracies - and especially where global challenges are exacerbated by particular regional crises: For example, the structural change in Lusatia forced by the coal phase-out.

Based on Stefan Brunnhuber's (Prof. for Psychology and Transformation at Mittweida University of Applied Sciences) book "Die offene Gesellschaft. Ein Plädoyer für Freiheit und Ordnung im 21. Jahrhundert“ (oekom-Verlag Munich, 2019), lecturers and students at the Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences are organizing various discourses on the subject.

This takes place in four formats: An interdisciplinary lecture series, a conference with students, teachers, representatives of regional civil society and national experts, the integration of the topic into the teaching of various courses of study, and a short competition with students from different disciplines on the topic: "Write down three sentences or draw a picture about what an Open Society is for you?"

• Die Ergebnisse des Studierenden-Kunstwettbewerb "Die offene Gesellschaft" vom April/Mai 2021 finden Sie in aller Ausführlichkeit hier in der entsprechenden Newsmeldung!