Editorial

We start this year’s edition of the magazine with the writer Alisa Ganieva, who affords us deep insight into the political constitution of her Russian homeland. Political scientist Barbara Prainsack examines the question as to how societies attain solidarity in the beneficial use of their citizens’ digital data. For his part, the neurobiologist and brain scientist Giovanni Galizia is interested in the sense of smell, which is why he is studying how bees in fact dream of smells. Our “Letter from Berlin” appears twice over in this edition – once as a feuilleton-style essay by sociologist Barbara Thériault and then in philosopher Andrew Hui’s dive back into his own musical past.

If we don’t here address the Russo-Ukrainian War and hostilities in the Middle East, this doesn’t mean that the Fellows are so completely absorbed in their own highly specialized projects that they remain detached from and indifferent to the general world situation. These two current major conflicts have been and continue to be debated at the Wissenschaftskolleg not only in personal conversations but in public discussions and at evening lectures. Our highly diverse community of Fellows, though, illustrates how even extreme political conflicts and supposedly irreconcilable interests need not impede a critical exchange and curiosity about one another.