November 21 + 22, 2024 | The contributions to the 17th Annual Colloquium of the MPIfG will explore academic freedom and the challenges it faces in contemporary times. What tensions exist for institutions and those who work in them? What role can science play in increasingly polarized public debates? And what are the implications of these developments for the future of research in Germany? We invite experts, stakeholders, and members of the public to discuss these questions with us. The exact program will be published in September.

Jens Beckert and Lukas Arndt investigate the influence of negative narratives about the future on the Greek sovereign debt crisis. Based on sentiments and a machine learning model for predicting future reference, they identify newspaper articles which generate negative and uncertain outlooks for the future in the expert discourse. Their findings provide good evidence for the relevance of “imagined futures” for investors’ behavior, and give directions for an innovative contribution of sociology to understanding the microfoundations of financial crises.

In her talk, Kimberly Morgen discusses the extensive buildup of border policing and immigration enforcement in the United States since the start of the 2000s as an example of state expansion. She analyzes how and why governing power has been mobilized and deployed in this way, and what larger ramifications this has for how we theorize and study states.