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For the first time since the beginning of the COVID19 pandemic, the IRS Spring Academy took place again in Erkner and Berlin at the end of May 2022. The event series is aimed at international doctoral and post-doctoral researchers in the interdisciplinary field of spatial research. They get the opportunity to work intensively together on a topic, to exchange ideas across disciplines and to network. With its special mix of formats, the Spring Academy addresses the needs of researchers in the early stages of their careers. The theme of the Spring Academy 2022 was "Spaces of Infection". The Robert Koch Institute was the local partner. more info

Since 2018, the ExTrass project of the IRS research group Urban Sustainability Transformations has been researching how active German cities – especially medium-sized cities and smaller large cities – are in climate policy: What they are doing to adapt to increasing extreme weather events, but also to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. In cooperation with the University of Potsdam and other partners, the team developed both a quantitative overview and detailed qualitative case studies. Now a two-year transfer phase has begun, in which the ExTrass research results will be translated even more strongly into recommendations for planning and municipal policy practice. more info

We are shocked by the illegal war of aggression against Ukraine, which was launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin. We are deeply affected by the suffering inflicted on the people of Ukraine. We are also deeply concerned for colleagues, friends and family members who are personally in danger because of the war in Ukraine. The invasion, long prepared by the Russian leadership, is also an attack on the values of freedom, democracy and human dignity that are important to us. As members of the international scientific community, we stand up for non-violence, self-determination and truth-based discourse - principles that are fundamentally violated by the belligerent aggression. more info

More than any other pandemic before, COVID-19 has been measured and mapped. However, the use of comparatively detailed data has not only proved to be a pillar of pandemic control, but also opens up new possibilities for research into epidemic outbreaks. It is striking that although the course of the COVID-19 pandemic corresponds to the known temporal wave pattern, these waves spread spatially in different ways. The new DFG-funded research project of the IRS “Socio-Spatial Diffusion of COVID-19 in Germany (CoDiff)” has been working on this point since the beginning of February 2022 in order to gain new insights into the spatially non-linear course of the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers involved in the project are using the existing tempo-spatial data situation to gain new insights into the spatial spread of epidemic outbreaks. more info

At the end of 2021, the Franco-German Historians Committee awarded the dissertation prize to historian Daniel Hadwiger, a researcher at the IRS, for his study “Nationale Solidarität und ihre Grenzen. Die deutsche Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt und der französische Secours national im Zweiten Weltkrieg“ (“National Solidarity and its Borders. The German National Socialist People's Welfare and the French Secours national in the Second World War”). In the presence of the Board of the Historians Committee, the Director of the Centre Marc Bloch, Prof. Jakob Vogel, and the representative of the Science Department of the French Embassy in Berlin, Dr. Bernard Ludwig, the prize was ceremoniously awarded at the Centre Marc Bloch on 18 November 2021. more info