The Blankensee-Colloquia are international workshops, each on an innovative issue from the humanities or social sciences. Under the thematic umbrella “Cultural and Social Change”, the focus is on researching the processes of societal and cultural change of our time. Welcome are combinations of various disciplinary and methodological approaches and a comparative perspective from which such processes of change can be viewed, also in the light of faraway and culturally unfamiliar experiences.

The Blankensee-Colloquia aim to foster younger researchers in the Berlin region and at the same time to work on especially interesting issues. Younger researchers at the beginning of their careers have the opportunity to present themselves and their work in the context of an international workshop or seminar and in a circle of relevantly specialized domestic and foreign colleagues. Research on new issues is preferred. Accordingly, the thematic framework of the program “Cultural and Social Change” is consciously kept broad. It should be understood as an invitation to address issues that are not at the center of the respective discipline or the usual work. The Blankensee-Colloquia seek to offer space for discussing novel, experimental research interests and to promote their acceptance.

To this end, tenders for the Blankensee-Colloquia are generally invited annually as an idea competition titled “Cultural and Social Change”. The competition targets researchers in the region who have completed their doctorate or their habilitation or who have recently been appointed to academic positions. Interested parties are invited to apply with a sketch of their ideas. Invited to the Colloquia are representatives of Berlin and Brandenburg research institutions and observers from organizations that foster research.

Presidents and rectors from the following institutions share responsibility for the program:

• Freie Universität Berlin
• Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Technische Universität Berlin
• Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Berlin (BBAW)
• Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB)
• Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin

1. "Emergent Forms of Life. Towards a Social and Cultural Anthropology of Life Sciences", December 11 – 13, 2003, organised by Dr. Stefan Beck and Dr. Michi Knecht  
    
2. "Der Begriff des Politischen in Europa", May 11 – 13, 2004, organised by Professor Dr. Ulrich Haltern, LL.M.
    
3. "The Future of Intervention: Intervention,  Legitimacy and the Reconstruction of Statehood", July 16 – 18, 2004, organised by Dr. habil. Christoph Zuercher und Dr. Kristof Gosztonyi
    
4. "Language Evolution - Cognitive and Cultural Factors", July 14 – 17, 2005, organised by Dr. habil. Regine Eckardt, Dr. habil. Gerhard Jäger and Dr. Tonjes Veenstra
    
5. "Public and Private Resource Governance: Mutations and Transformations of a Grand Dichotomy", January 13 – 15, 2006, organised by Dr. Thomas Sikor, Professor Dr. Eva Barlösius, Dr. Waltina Scheumann and Dr. habil. Susanne Still-Kleemann
    
6. "Simulation als Kulturtechnik. Forschung zum Wandel des mathematischen Blicks der Wissenschaft auf die Welt und seine kulturellen und sozialen Folgen für die Gesellschaft", September 20 – 22, 2007, organised by Dr. Gabriele Gramelsberger
    
7. "Organisierte Kriminalität als Konstrukt, gesellschaftliche Herausforderung und Forschungsgegenstand", February 27 – March 3, 2008, organised by Dr. Klaus von Lampe
    
8. "Bridging the Gap Between Economics and Area Studies", July 8 – 10, 2009, organised by Professor Barbara Fritz (FU Berlin), Professor Carsten Herrmann Pillath (Universität Witten/Herdecke) and
   Dr. Stephan Panther (Universität Flensburg)
    
9. "Hearing Modern History, Auditory Cultures in the 19th and 20th Century", June 17 – 19, 2010, organised by Dr. Daniel Morat (Freie Universität Berlin)
    
10. "Neighborhood Technologies. Media  and Mathematics of Dynamic Networks", August 30 – September 01, 2012, organised by Dr. Sebastian Vehlken (Lüneburg) and Dr. Tobias Harks (Maastricht)
     
11. "Verfassung und Verteilung", May 31 – June 02, 2013, organised by Professor Anna Bettina Kaiser (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Professor Sigrid Boysen (Freie Universität Berlin), and Dr. Florian Meinel (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
     
12. "Unfolding the 'Muslim Question'. Towards a genealogy of religious freedom and the minority question in Western European nation states", June 19 – 21, 2014,  organised by Shirin Amir Moazami (Freie Universität Berlin) und Nadia Fadil (Leuven)
     
13. "Nudge versus Educate: Comparing two Approaches to Policy in Terms of their Modeling Strategies", June 03 – 06, 2014 in Blankensee, organised by Konstantinos Katsikopoulos (MPI für Bildungsforschung), Niklas Keller (Charité Berlin) und Till Grüne Yanoff (Stockholm)
     
14. “From Phantom Maps to Real Boundaries. Comparison of the post-soviet and the post-yugoslav context", March 10 – 11, 2016, organised by Dr. Sabine von Löwis (Centre Marc Bloch) and Dr. Nenad Stefanov (Humboldt-Universität)
     
15. "Antiakademismus", March 16 – 18, 2017, organised by Dr. Hannah Engelmeier (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main) and Dr. Philipp Felsch (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
     
16. “Wild Publics: Language in public space under the conditions of late modernity”, March 22 – 25, 2018, organised by Dr. Theresa Heyd and Dr. Britta Schneider (both Institut für Englische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin)
     
17. “RÜCKZUG — Produktivität des Solitären in Kunst, Religion und Geschlechtergeschichte”, October 04 – 06, 2018, organised by Jun.-Prof. Dr. Xenia von Tippelskirch (Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Jun.- Prof. Dr. Beatrice Trînca (Institut für Religionswissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin), and Dr. Jenny Haase (Institut für Romanistik, Humboldt-Uniersität zu Berlin)
     
18. “Capturing and Analyzing Social Change: Opportunities of Analyzing Visual Data in the 21st Century”, June 07 – 08, 2019, organised by Anne Nassauer (Freie Universität Berlin) and Nicolas Legewie (Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung). Please find here a short report and an extended report
     
19. “Jüdischer Film – ein neues Forschungsgebiet im deutschsprachigen Raum?”,January 15 – 17, 2020, organised byLea Wohl von Haselberg, (Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF)
     
20. “Sexuelle Selbstbestimmung jenseits des Körperlichen. Eine interdisziplinäre Vermessung des strafrechtlichen Schutzes im 21. Jahrhunderts”, March 17 – 19, 2022, organised by Boris Burghardt (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Anja Schmidt (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) and Leonie Steinl (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
     
21. "Sketches of Black Europe: Imagining Europe/ans in African and African Diasporic Narratives", March 23.– 25,  2022, organised by Sandra Folie (Universität Wien) and Gianna Zocco (Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) Berlin. Please find here a description and an information on a book that was published in 2024. 
     
22. “Who captures the gains? New theoretical concepts on the impact of digital transformation on the global economy”, September 14 – 16, 2022, organised by Florian Butollo (WZB and Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society) and Gale Raj-Reichert (WZB)
     
23. “Meinungsfreiheit: Transformation und Regulierung politischer Öffentlichkeiten”, March 20 – 22, 2024, organised by Romy Jaster and Christian Neumeier (both Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)