In an ERC Consolidator Grant, Maike Luhmann is exploring how places relate to loneliness. She also hopes to find out how loneliness can be combated.
Are there any places where people feel particularly lonely or where they don’t feel lonely at all? Professor Maike Luhmann argues that the relationship between place and loneliness should be described in dynamic terms. What one person finds lonely, another may find inviting. A place that seems desolate to one person on one day may seem completely different on another day or at another time. In her project “Loneliness Across Time And Space” (LOTIS), Luhmann, a professor of psychological methods at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, is putting this dynamic relationship into a new theoretical framework, while incorporating people’s mobility patterns at the same time. The project is funded by the European Research Council ERC with a Consolidator Grant of approximately 2 million euros over five years.
The University Alliance Ruhr continues to expand its cutting-edge research in Duisburg-Essen, Bochum, and Dortmund.
The four Research Centers and the College of the University Alliance Ruhr (UA Ruhr) form a new research hub in the Ruhr area. Twenty-seven international top scientists have already chosen a future within the UA Ruhr and thus at one of the three partner universities: Ruhr University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, or the University of Duisburg-Essen. In total, more than 50 new research professorships are being created within the centers and the college.
Some of the center researchers are part of the new hub: Lucia Melloni, Caspar Schwiedrzik.
REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN! Please register by 30.04.2025. There are no registration fees.
GEM 2025 will be 100% in-person. We look forward to welcoming you in Bochum, Germany. Our call for abstracts is open!
This conference is organized and funded by the DFG-funded research group FOR 2812 “Constructing scenarios of the past: A new framework in episodic memory”. On-site childcare can be provided on request. Please request on registration.
Episodic memories are widely regarded as memories of personally experienced events. Early concepts about episodic memory were based on the storage model, according to which experiential content is preserved in memory and later retrieved. However, overwhelming empirical evidence suggests that the content of episodic memory is – at least to a certain degree – constructed in the act of remembering. Even though very few contemporary researchers would oppose this view of episodic memory as a generative process, it has not become the standard paradigm of empirical memory research. This is particularly true for studies of the neural correlates of episodic memory. Further hindering progress are large conceptual differences regarding episodic memory across different fields, such as neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. This interdisciplinary conference therefore aims to bring together researchers from all relevant fields to advance the state of the art in the research on generative episodic memory.
