The Vision and Mission of the 7th Faculty
What is the 7th Faculty?
With our work, we want to make a significant contribution to the social responsibility of our university. Through a professional and targeted transfer of knowledge from research to society, we actively contribute to counteracting science scepticism and hostility towards democracy and thus promote an open and informed social discourse.
Our aim is also to continuously develop the 7th Faculty as a university platform for professional, coordinated and evaluated science communication at an internationally competitive level.
The Mission of the 7th Faculty
The 7th Faculty of the University of Graz sees science communication as an open dialogue between experts and the public. We support our researchers in making their work accessible, understandable and visible to a broader public. The focus is on the development and implementation of innovative formats and training courses.
Our programme reaches various target groups both within and outside the university. Through accompanying research and active international networking, we ensure that science communication at the University of Graz is modern, relevant and innovative.
The vision of the 7th Faculty
We strive to communicate science in an open and understandable way in order to promote dialogue between research and society. Under the motto “We work for tomorrow”, we focus on dialogue that creates trust and makes science accessible. With innovative formats and multimedia concepts, we want to strengthen the connection between the past and the future and make research at the University of Graz accessible to everyone.
The structures and players behind the 7th Faculty
As an interdisciplinary unit, it is important to us to reflect the diversity of research at the University of Graz in our range of formats and training courses. Our activities and expertise are concentrated in the areas of Science Communication (Head: Univ.-Prof. Helmut Jungwirth) and University Museums (Head: Dr. Bernadette Biedermann). Experts from the 7th Faculty develop independent formats in these areas and work closely with researchers from the university. This connection is central to us: as direct actors in science, we want to support scientists in making their work accessible to a broad audience in a simple and contemporary way.
In addition, through our close collaboration with the political scientist Dr. Katrin Praprotnik (Department of Public Law and Political Science at REWI Graz), we are continuously focussing on democracy research and political education. We also see this as a targeted commitment against anti-democratic social tendencies.
Pupils in particular are more than just a target group for us: since they play a key role as future shapers of society, it is very important for us as a university to get young people excited about science and its possibilities. In addition to special programmes in the Hands-on Labs and University Museums we are supported by the Children’s Art Academy with an innovative programme to appeal to younger generations.
If you want to promote knowledge transfer, you can’t limit yourself to your own campus: through numerous collaborations with civil society and cultural institutions in and around Graz, we ensure that our activities also have an impact beyond the university.
Under the leadership of Vice-Rector Univ.-Prof. Markus Fallenböck we as the 7th Faculty stand for a contemporary form of science communication – as a multifaceted unit that carries the research of the University of Graz into society in a sustainable way, in line with the idea of “science communication rethought, redone”.