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Research institutes

FASoS Research Institute

Moving boundaries, bridging disciplines

The research institute of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) at Maastricht University studies societies and cultures as they unfolded during the modern and contemporary era in a radically interdisciplinary manner. We analyse the interrelationships of Europeanisation, globalisation, scientific and technological development, political change and cultural innovation. We are interested in how today’s societies cope with and reflect these challenges in various ways. These could be artistic practices and practices of remembrance as well as specific forms of governance and political integration as well as strategies for managing knowledge, technologies and risks. While our research starts from today’s problems, we have a strong interest in how the modern world came to be.

Research

To nurture and maintain this kind of innovative, interdisciplinary research, the research institute of FASoS has created a matrix organisational structure. Its backbone are four distinct research programmes, each of which is composed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers. While the research programmes form the core of the research activities at FASoS, the faculty also has five centres as specific research hubs and to facilitate interaction with external academic partners and societal stakeholders. Together, the research programmes and the research centres provide a framework that facilitates flexibility, networking, and mobility beyond disciplinary boundaries.

News

  • Lauren will spend February-June 2025 in Amsterdam at NIAS among a group of international fellows who are working independently in a wide variety of disciplines, problems, and research perspectives.

  • Janosch Prinz received, together with Enzo Rossi (UvA) and Manon Westpahl (Münster), a €310,000 Gerda Henkel Foundation grant for the project “Contours of a Non-Oligarchic Democratic Future”.

  • Max Boutell and Sharon Anyango will work on separate projects on the role adaptive architects in the neoliberal turn, and on gender expectations of Somali and Eritrean refugees in the Netherlands.

More news items
  • How do people interact with each other on social media and other online platforms? How do they end up in conflict? And most importantly: how can we prevent these discussions from escalating? PhD candidate Maud Oostindie is researching these questions. On top of that, she is the new ‘Face of Science’...

  • Pablo Del Hierro has been awarded this year’s Valorisation Prize for his outreach activities following the project "(Neo)Fascist Metropolis: Madrid and the Transnational Far Right Networks since the end of the Spanish Civil War". The honourable mention this year goes to Elsje Fourie’s and Christin...