Collaborative Research Center 1567

Collaborative Research Center “Virtual Lifeworlds” to Receive Continued Funding

05/15/2026

Researchers and participants explore virtual environments as part of the Collaborative Research Center “Virtual Lifeworlds,” investigating how virtuality shapes everyday practices, education, work, and social participation.

Virtuality has long since become part of everyday life. Since 2022, the Collaborative Research Center 1567 “Virtual Lifeworlds” has demonstrated the profound impact virtuality has on communication, knowledge transfer, bodily and affective practices, social negotiations, economic structures, language, subjectivations, and forms of coexistence. Now, the German Research Foundation has approved a second funding phase for the consortium, which is embedded in the Ruhr Innovation Lab’s area of high potential “Engaging Complexity – Knowledge, Media & Society”. Ruhr University Bochum coordinates the project; researchers from the University Alliance Ruh are involved, including three researchers from TU Dortmund University.

During the first funding phase of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC), the researchers examined virtuality as a normal component of everyday practices. The perspective was deliberately broad and encompassed the humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies. With the Virtual University, the CRC established a shared framework that brings together research, teaching, and science communication. The researchers focused not only on successful normality but also on disruptions, ambivalences, and boundary crossings—as a counterbalance to narratives of digitization driven purely by efficiency.

In the second funding phase, the focus shifts to specific areas of tension within virtual living environments. The research examines how virtuality is reshaping schools, universities, the workplace, and political negotiation; where artistic visions of the world intersect with issues of access, responsibility, transparency, and participation—not least under the influence of AI; and how civil society’s repair practices clash with global supply chains.

“For us, virtuality is not a tool for efficiency, but an open space for creative design—from the conception of new realities to AI—that requires critical reflection and demands responsibility, transparency, and participation,” said spokesperson Professor Stefan Rieger of the Institute for Media Studies at Ruhr University Bochum.

The Virtual University remains at the heart of this collaboration, integrating research, teaching, and science communication, reflecting on its own practices of virtuality, and developing an expanded form of virtual literacy. At the same time, in line with the Third Mission, it reaches out to the region: Through the WIKO subproject—which is part of the Virtual University—the CRC oversees a regionally focused citizen science project in which inclusive application scenarios are developed in collaboration with citizens.

“In this consortium, we are actively shaping science; we are opening it up and not letting ourselves be driven by technical developments. By highlighting the real-world relevance of our research, we demonstrate that the study of virtuality is not an academic end in itself—it has transformed our lived worlds and will continue to do so,” says Stefan Rieger.

CRC Virtual Lifeworlds

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