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Transregional Center for Democratic Studies
from 2020 NSSR Viewbook
Transregional Center for Democratic Studies
Building on the interdisciplinary tradition of NSSR, the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) creates and implements crossdepartmental programs aimed at addressing special needs and opportunities for research and graduate or advanced undergraduate study that can promote better understanding of the world. TCDS cultivates research on the increasingly globalized public sphere and the emergence of autonomous publics and nurtures a new kind of citizen-researcher concerned with the ways society, embedded in a specific cultural and historical context, debates and seeks solutions to shared problems.
The center’s programs (public events, workshops, conferences, and summer institutes conducted in New York City and abroad) facilitate study, research, and debates on the challenges of democracy and democratization and the related issues of development, citizenship, and intercultural conversation in a globalized world. The programs are also aimed at building bridges between academic research and the “real” world of democratic practice, where policies and local strategies are designed and civic innovation comes to life.
For this reason, TCDS welcomes as partners and collaborators scholars who are involved in public life and in efforts to strengthen civil society.
TCDS’s activities provide a solid link between New York and eastern Europe, a site of ongoing democratic transformation that reveals the vulnerability of democracy to illiberal solutions and even violence. The center’s initiatives have led to the emergence of extensive scholarly networks in the region, bringing young scholars and civically committed academics together with NSSR graduate students.
TCDS’s flagship program is the Democracy & Diversity Institute, held annually in July in Wrocław, Poland. The institute is an intensive three-week program of study in which up to 40 young civic-minded scholars engage through discussion and debate in a rigorous quest for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the challenges to democracy in the contemporary world.
