Announcing our Fellows
We are delighted to announce our new post-doctoral fellows for the academic year 2024/25. The Claus Wisser Postdoctoral Program at Normative Orders, funded by a generous donation from the late Claus Wisser and carried out in cooperation with the Pro Universitate Foundation, invites two outstanding postdoctoral researchers to Frankfurt every year to conduct research on central questions of the transformation of normative orders. Each year a specific topic is chosen; this year it will be “The Future of Democracy”. The program is directed by Prof. Rainer Forst and Prof. Nicole Deitelhoff.
The fellows of the academic year 2024/25 are Luca Hemmerich and Selma Kropp.
Luca Hemmerich recently submitted his dissertation, entitled “The Concept of Interest. An Objectivist Reconception”, supervised by Dirk Jörke at TU Darmstadt. He was a doctoral student and research assistant at the Department of Political Theory and History of Ideas at TU Darmstadt from 2020 to 2024. He previously studied social sciences, mathematics and political theory in Bielefeld, Frankfurt and Darmstadt. Stays abroad during his doctorate and master's degree took him to Oxford, Lancaster and the New School for Social Research. His current research project “Institutions for the Future of Democracy” is dedicated to the growing ecological crisis, which is one of the most pressing challenges facing democracy today. The project is based on the assumption that current liberal-democratic institutions are ill-prepared for this crisis due to systemic reasons. Accordingly, an appropriate response to the ecological crisis requires a structural change to existing democratic institutions. The focus here is particularly on the question of how the interests of future generations and non-human nature can be adequately taken into account in political institutions.
Selma Kropp works on bureaucratic action in International and Regional Organizations, human rights, and children’s rights. Her PhD thesis, which she pursued at the European University Institute in Florence, is entitled “Children’s Rights in Regional Organizations Bureaucratic Agency and Normative Change.” Her Claus Wisser Fellowship project is entitled “Children’s Rights in the Context of Migration: Navigating the Regime Complex between Strasbourg, Brussels, and Geneva.” It explores how European bureaucrats use organizational overlaps between the Council of Europe and the European Union to raise controversial children’s rights issues on the European agenda. One of the most contentious issues among member states of the European Union concerns children’s rights in migration situations. Even though international and European law posits that children should be deprived of their liberty only as a measure of last resort, children continue to be detained in Europe in migration-related contexts. This has been highlighted, for instance, in the last UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty in 2019. By examining attempts by European member states to avoid public scrutiny when it comes to violations of self-set standards at the international level as well as reactions by European bureaucrats, this project fits into the current theme of Normative Orders, “The Future of Democracy”. Theoretically, it contributes to regime complexity and critical International Relations norm research.