Faculty for Interdisciplinary Research and Continuing Education
The Faculty for Interdisciplinary Research and Continuing Education (IFF) is one of four Faculties at the University of Klagenfurt. The founding principle of the IFF is to link scholarship to contemporary social issues and problems. Reflecting this, the Faculty’s structure is built around the social field of the research rather than in line with individual scientific disciplines. Research work is focused on questions concerning societies’ relationship with public goods such as health, environment, spatial resources, technology, education, science, politics and culture at large. Research, teaching and continuing education at the IFF pursue dual aims – one of which is social and the other scholarly. Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity form the basis of both the theory and practice of the IFF’s research concept. This means that researchers from various disciplines, experts and actors from various professional fields work together in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects and research areas focussing, among others, upon social, historical and systems science contexts. The projects are intervention-oriented. To intervene successfully, an understanding of the system- and organisational aspects of the problem is of central importance. Work undertaken by the Faculty therefore focuses upon encouraging well-reflected decision-making both in an individual and collective context. Concrete social problems and issues