The “key concepts of social cohesion” are aimed at an intellectually open-minded, curious reader and thinker. They should also find their place on the bookshelves of political decision-makers and be within reach of other relevant social multipliers (trade unions, cultural institutions, churches, schools, public libraries, etc.). Since, in addition to book form, the aim is to have two volumes of 200 to 250 pages, which can also be purchased individually, as well as releases on blogs and in cooperation with the Federal Agency for Civic Education/bpb, the texts on individual terms are also aimed at an Internet-savvy, presumably aimed at a younger target group. This will be reflected both in the creation of the corpus of terms (which will not only take into account academic but also everyday semantics of cohesion, e.g. those spread on the Internet) as well as in the formal structure and linguistic form of the texts, each of which is around 8 to 10 printed pages long.
We currently have two sections in mind for each volume, each with around 10, so a total of around 40 contributions. The texts should essentially outline the respective key terms in a present-oriented manner. Stylistically, a good mixture of conciseness and clarity is required. Historical deep cuts can only be made occasionally. A historically well-founded introduction (and intermediate introductions to the rubrics) would be the place to develop a diachronic forerun and to clarify, by way of example, the extent to which a currently dominant ensemble of key concepts of social cohesion bears a time-specific note. We would like to supplement the publication of the two planned volumes in a larger trade publisher or a scientific publisher with a significant impact on a broader academically and politically interested public with decoupling, i.e. parallel or previous publications, as well as with in-depth journalistic reflections on current and historical semantics of social cohesion, this preferably also in large supra-regional daily and weekly newspapers. On the website of the FGZ-Konstanz and / or the central website, we would also like to have podcasts of selected contributions and parallel reflections on the connection between language / speaking and cohesion, for example in the form of short expert interviews.
The concrete Konstanz research focuses on selected topics and levels of analysis: Beside the focus on migration, employment integration and the current structural change in the public sphere, in addition to narratives and practices of cohesion, we would also like to use the key terms to capture the level of semantics. We currently have a provisional classification in mind that we would like to use as a basis for our further conceptual work on site: 1. basic socio-ontological concepts, 2. political concepts of struggle, 3. key concepts of the Federal Republic of Germany, 4. global concepts of interdependence. This preliminary structure is based in particular on the institute-wide research priorities and aims to combine work on basic concepts with exemplary contributions to the current German discourse landscape, without ignoring the transformation of conceptual ensembles in the context of political, economic and cultural globalization. The jointly developed, provisional institute-wide heuristic will also be a guiding principle, especially when articles on individual lemmata trace how and when descriptive ways of describing cohesion are normatively (and affectively) charged.
