News 2024

Prof. Dr Wolfgang Schmid, holder of the Professorship of Quantitative Methods, in particular Statistics, received a special honour on 19 December 2024 when companions presented him with a publication on statistical research dedicated to him. Entitled "Advanced Statistical Methods in Process Monitoring, Finance, and Environmental Science", the anthology brings together 24 contributions.

In a rapidly changing media landscape with more and more opportunities to receive and disseminate information, the perception and representation of war and the discourse about it is also changing. In the "War Sensing" project, Prof Dr Miglė Bareikytė and Johanna Hiebl are investigating how exactly digital media and data practices function in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine, which actors play a role in this and how they shape representations of the war.

Climate economist Prof. Dr Reimund Schwarze reported on his view of the COP 29 - the United Nations Climate Summit, which took place from 11 to 22 November 2024 in Baku in Azerbaijan - at the Viadrina on 27 November 2024. The long-time observer of the climate conferences also dispelled some prejudices.

33 young men and women from seven countries received their graduation certificates at the Viadrina College at the end of October. The programme has been running for ten years and around 300 future Viadrina students have now completed it. Three of this year's participants talk about how the Viadrina College has prepared them for their studies.

On 21 October 2024, the Karl Renner Institute in Vienna awarded the Kurt Rothschild Prize to Viadrina economist Prof. Dr Jana Costas for her book "Im Minus-Bereich: Reinigungskräfte und ihr Kampf um Würde", which received a lot of media attention. The English version of the study entitled "Dramas of Dignity: Cleaners in the Corporate Underworld of Berlin" had already been honoured with the "Responsible Research in Management" award by the Academy of Management in August 2024. In July 2023, Jana Costas received the book prize from the European Group for Organisation Studies (EGOS). In this interview, the researcher talks about her methodological approach to the "underworld" of cleaning staff, the challenges she has faced and the research questions she is now pursuing.

How can you combine studying with work, competitive sports and leisure? Moritz Berthold does all of that. He studies International Business Administration at the Viadrina, works as a student trainee at the Institute for Medical Diagnostics Oderland and trains for the para-canoeing championships in Cottbus. In July, he won the bronze medal in the Vl 1 class at the European Championships in Hungary. Ahead of the Canoe Marathon World Championships in Croatia, we spoke to him about accessibility, his love of sports and what he is giving up for it.

Despite the increasing awareness of large-scale crises, the understanding of how organisations construct urgency during protracted crises remains limited. In their latest study, published in the Journal of Management Studies, the Viadrina economists Dr Lorenzo Skade, Elisa Lehrer, Dr Yanis Hamdali and Prof. Dr Jochen Koch examine the activities of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their findings emphasise the complex nature of urgency, its construction through temporal practices and contribute to a deeper understanding of crisis management. Here the team reports on their findings. The original text was published on the Management Studies Insights blog.

The Viadrina College offers future students from other countries numerous opportunities to obtain a further education admissions certificate to study at the Viadrina, for example with the fast track programme. In cooperation with an Uzbek lyceum, pupils from Tashkent have been intensively prepared for the transition to the fast track and subsequent studies at the Viadrina in a new project in the last two years. In July, they came to Frankfurt (Oder) for a language course and got to know the city and university better. On 25 July 2024, they met participants of the current fast track.

The ERLab Days were organised at the Viadrina from 27 to 29 May 2024: the first major event of the "Entrepreneurship Research Lab" project became a mixture of academic conference and regional exploration in Berlin and Brandenburg. In this article, the ERLab team looks back on the event with the help of Chat GPT and looks ahead to the next steps.

As a rule, refugees are not allowed to move for at least three years after their protection status has been recognised. But how useful is this residence regulation? Prof Dr Felix Weinhardt and Constantin Tielkes, Professorship of Public Economics, have published a study on this topic. Their verdict: the residence regulation is imprecise, does not promote integration and is a burden on immigration authorities. They will present their findings at the Research Factory B/ORDERS IN MOTION on 12 June.