The Institute for Political Sciences at the Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany covers all important subfields of political sciences, its main fields of research and teaching being political systems, international relations, European Policy and empirical methods in political sciences. With respect to Civil Society, Citizenship and New Forms of Governance in Europe much of the research and teaching of the Institute addresses exactly these issues and in particular the relations between the EU and new Eastern European countries, multi-level-governance and institution building in the EU , and  the role of new media shaping active citizenship and the public discourse.

Through EU programmes, the Institute for Political Sciences has created a lively exchange of students in political sciences with EU related interests. In this context both Prof. Evers and a number of colleagues have gained experience with international research networks and EU-sponsored networks and research.

Contact Details 

Address:          

Institute for Political Sciences

Department for Social and Cultural Sciences

Ludvigstrasse 23,

D-35390 Giessen

GERMANY  

Tel.:  + 46 641 993 9305

Fax.:  + 46 641 993 9309

E-mail:        adalbert.evers@uni-giessen.de                            

Web-page:      www.uni-giessen.de/~gj71/

About  Adalbert Evers, National Co-ordinator, Germany

from Justus Liebig University  

Professor Adalbert Evers, Dr. rer.pol, is a full Professor of Comparative Health and Social Policy at the Institute for Political Sciences and at the Institute for Home Economics at the Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen (Germany). He holds a doctoral degree in political sciences and a lecturer degree in political sociology).  He has been guest professor at the Department for Social Policy at the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) and at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. (Austria)  Dr. Evers has also been  Director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt a.M. (Germany).

In recent years, his research has addressed social policy, civil society, civic engagement, the politics of social policy and the third sector. Dr. Evers was a member of the Parliamentary Commission on the Future of Civic Engagement and he is speaker of the Section of Social Policy in the German Sociological Association.  Adalbert Evers has most recently written about social capital and civic commitment; labour market policies and social integration in Europe; and on the third sector in Europe.

About Claudia Wiesner

from Justus Liebig University  

Claudia Wiesner, M.A. in Political Sciences  is Assistant to Prof. Dr. Adalbert Evers and a Ph.D student at Giessen University in, Germany. At present she is Speaker of  Section 7 (Culture and Society) of the interdisciplinary Giessen Graduate School for the Humanities and member of the ESF Network  on “The Politics and History of European Democratisation” .

Her Ph.D. project: Transnational Democracy – possibilities and limits to the constitution of its subjects; an examination of the example of the European Union deals with establishing a democratic subject on a level where no “demos” is defined or existing. Presenting the most advanced example of a development towards trans-national democracy, she examines the status and development of demos in the European Union. The dissertation addresses the criteria that seem relevant to the further development of demos and examines questions of citizenship, identity and politics in Europe and National States.