Projects

In response to escalating global crises, public and scholarly debates in Germany and Japan increasingly focus on how technologies can strengthen social resilience. Key domains include e-health, AI, sensor-based systems, robotics, and telemedicine. Yet a significant gap remains in cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary dialogue that situates these technologies within specific crisis contexts and draws on insights from sociology, cultural studies, sport science, ethics, and medicine.

RE-CARE addresses this gap by pursuing three objectives:

• examine how crises are perceived and addressed;
• explore the potential of technology in areas such as healthcare, sport, and public health;
• and lay the groundwork for future German-Japanese collaboration.

Generative AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini) are transforming research and teaching in higher education. However, empirical evidence on students’ adoption, expectations, and concerns regarding AI tools remains scarce. The project “Artificial Intelligence in Sport” (AIS) addresses this gap through a quantitative study with students in sport-related programmes.

COVID-19 was — and remains — a global challenge in which digital technologies have played a key role. In interdisciplinary research, these technologies are often grouped into three functional domains: information, communication, and containment. Highly digitised East Asian countries have shown how the public can participate actively in a digital pandemic response. Yet the deployment and governance of these tools also reveal marked differences between the so-called ‘West’ and ‘East’, grounded in distinct sociocultural foundations. TECHCO aims to foster a socioculturally sensitive dialogue. By comparing Germany and Japan and analysing salient crisis-technology cases, we seek to illuminate how cultural distinctions shape societal responses to emergencies.

ELISA aims to examine the roles and capabilities of real-time e-health technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, the project conducts a qualitative study to explore two discursive fields: (1) biomedical and health-professional discourse (medical associations, hospital personnel, professional bodies); and (2) critical expert discourse (scientists, IT specialists, civil-society actors and activists).

The doctoral monograph, based on a discourse analysis conducted at the University of Hamburg, examines the evolution of media and medical debates about intersex athletes in elite sport from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries. It shows how core elements of modern sport (binary sex classification; medical intervention and the ‘normalisation’ of intersex bodies; and notions of fair play and competitive equity) are negotiated within the social context of each era. The study centres on three emblematic athletes, each representing a specific period and its corresponding episteme of sex, identity, and gender: Dora Ratjen (1930s), Ewa Klobukowska (1960s), and Caster Semenya (early twenty-first century). The thesis received a Young Researcher Award from the German Sociological Association (DGS) and a Science Prize from the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB).