Foreword

It holds true for an academic career that the phase after a doctoral degree and before obtaining a tenured professorship is the most volatile, most vulnerable and most insecure. Conditions range from acting as personal research slaves to individual professors to being left alone in an academic cloud – to name just two extremes of the spectrum. In reality, things are not that bad after all: most researchers in the postdoctoral phase have reasonable working conditions. But reasonable is not optimal! There is a lot of debate as to which are the best conditions for fostering good scholarship, for identifying the best researchers who will then obtain professorships, and for facilitating the creation of research networks that function well. 

Different countries, different universities and – within a university – different departments offer various propositions. At the University of Konstanz, we too offer a variety of solutions, from assistant positions and externally funded postdocs to tenure-track professorships, and we also offer – for me the most important instrument – the Zukunftskolleg: fellowships within an academic environment that gives independence, interdisciplinary exposure, international networks, intra-university stability and intragenerational connections. This is the famous 5i strategy of the Zukunftskolleg.

We at the Zukunftskolleg are convinced that modern research is a social enterprise. We need to interconnect with other researchers, discuss research questions far away from our own discipline as well, expose our thoughts to other critical minds. This is so important and in so many ways: from having new, unexpected ideas within our own discipline to being confronted with implications outside it – be they ethical, societal or economic. It is only by building and fostering such networks that we can embed our research in the most fruitful way in our societies. That is why four of the five elements in the 5i strategy – the international, intergenerational, intra-university and interdisciplinary elements – are related to academic networks.

The networks we have created so far work! And we are creating new ones – by responding flexibly and quickly to new needs: in 2022, we offered rapid support with our Visiting Fellowships for postdoctoral researchers from Ukraine who can no longer pursue their research in their own country. They can stay in Konstanz at the Zukunftskolleg for up to six months. So far, we have accepted and are supporting twelve Ukrainian fellows and integrating them into our community. 

We are also responding to current requirements with this annual report: it is being published as a digital edition for the first time. We hope this will help not only in terms of advancing digitalization but also in terms of greater sustainability. The new annual report is divided into 16 stories: stories about the successful careers and projects of selected fellows, stories about new projects, people and formats, and stories about achievements and events in the past year.

On behalf of the entire Zukunftskolleg, I hope you enjoy clicking through it and wish you happy reading! You can also download the report as PDF.

Yours, 
Giovanni Galizia