SFB 1567
Virtual Environments
The virtual world is increasingly becoming normalised. The implications and consequences of this trend are being explored by more than 50 researchers in this Collaborative Research Centre.
Today, virtuality is a driving force for social and cultural transformation processes. As its manifestations have become more and more diverse, it’s been losing the nimbus of the extraordinary and has become more and more normalised within countless aspects of everyday life. This is where the SFB comes in, by looking at knowledge contents, practices, forms of debate and networking dynamics.
During the first funding phase of the Collaborative Research Center (SFB), researchers at Ruhr University Bochum examined virtuality as a normal component of everyday practices. The perspective adopted was deliberately broad, encompassing the humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies. With the Virtual University, the SFB established a shared framework that brings together research, teaching, and science communication. The researchers focused not only on successful normality, but also on disruptions, ambivalences, and boundary crossings—as a counterbalance to narratives of digitalization driven purely by efficiency.
In the second funding phase—which now also includes researchers from the Ruhr University Alliance—the focus shifts to specific areas of tension within virtual environments. The project examines how virtuality is reshaping schools, universities, the workplace, and political negotiation; where artistic visions of the world intersect with questions of access, responsibility, transparency, and participation—not least under the influence of AI; and how civil society repair practices clash with global supply chains.
The Virtual University remains at the heart of this collaboration, integrating research, teaching, and science communication, reflecting on its own practices of virtuality, and developing an expanded virtual literacy. At the same time, it opens up to the region in the spirit of the Third Mission: Through the WIKO subproject, which is part of the Virtual University, the SFB is responsible for a regionally based citizen science project in which inclusive application scenarios are developed in collaboration with citizens.
