Resources in Transformation (ReForm) – Leibniz ScienceCampus Bochum
Humans are confronted with changes all the time. To gain a deeper understanding of societies and their living environments, it is informative to see how people react to, initiate or are involved in transformative processes. Resources usually play a key role here: they indicate the things that people regard as relevant for their lives, for instance those things that satisfy physical, social or religious needs, and are therefore integrated in a society’s structures in a number of ways.
ReForm aims to research the transformative potential of resources, which is estimated to be significant, not just for the history of humanity but also for contemporary society, particularly in relation to socio-ecological aspects. Taking a multi-perspective approach, the project partners in the fields of the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and economics plan to investigate, by way of example, how humans are interconnected with their material environment through various practices and how social institutions emerge and change during these processes. The aim is to develop middle range theories and to test them, for example using agent-based modelling of various datasets.