Projects
The Projects of the Collaborative Research Center are organised in three Project Areas: (1) objects of property, (2) subjects of property and (3) systems of ownership.
Project Area Project Area Objects:
Problematic Objects of Property
Town, Nature, Knowledge
The concept of ownership is tailored to specific goods to a significant extent. Natural or legal persons can be owners of cars, computers, libraries, real estate, or businesses. But how does this apply to ownership of ideas, processes, programmed code, sperm and egg cells, areas of high biodiversity, streets and squares, football clubs, universities, wind, or water?
Project Area Project Area Subjects:
Conflicts Between Subjects of Property
Legal Entities, Social Inequality, Power Structures
Multiple lines of conflict are drawn between (non-)owners. The most well-known case involves questions and struggles over distribution, such as conflicting interests between capital and labour, private enterprise and state, or in light of historically conditioned inequalities between population groups rooted in colonialism and slavery, among other factors.
Project Area Project Area Systems of Ownership:
Systems of Ownership and Alternative Social Principles of Order
The public, the Private, the Communal
Questions about which objects challenge the form of property and how relationships and conflicts between property subjects are regulated also put property regimes up for debate. Even more fundamentally, they need to be discussed and analysed in terms of the role played by property in a social regulatory framework and how it is coordinated with other principles.