2 Reflexion und Anpassung – Über die Forschungssituation in Deutschland und das wissenschaftliche Streben nach Innovation durch Interdisziplinarität

Abstract

The starting point of this paper is the question how different scholars from different scientific cultures come together to work on a certain subject, in our case the broad term “mobility”. I argue that the postmodern perception of knowledge and technology, as uncertain paired with the permanent social need for innovation, created a scientific landscape where
interdisciplinarity is one of the most popular answers to our epistemic problems, especially in the growing area of external funding. In the following, I describe  certain aspects of the landscape of research in Germany in particular the Deutsche  Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as the largest institution of external funding and their implementation of innovation and interdisciplinarity. Finally, I discuss the origins of our research group which, in the zeitgeist of modern researching and due to the research proposal to the DFG, tried to find an innovative approach to the term mobility in an interdisciplinary setting.