Modern Worldviews and Culture Wars

In 2023 the Dutch Research Council (NWO) funded this four-year collaborative project, which poses the question: how did “worldview” develop into a key concept in academia, policy, and public debate in the twenty-first century in the US, UK, the Netherlands and Latin America? It seeks to answer this question by investigating the formative power of culture wars in shaping modern thought, politics and religion. It is a transnational and multilingual project that traces the history of worldview from its popularization in nineteenth-century Germany, to its invocation by Dutch and North American Christian thinkers, to its use by political ideologies such as National Socialism, and finally to its contemporary usage in Latin America in the context of emergence of Indigenous activism.

In addition to directing the project, historian Todd H. Weir (t.h.weir rug.nl) is writing a monograph on the development of worldview and its translations in the context of German, Dutch, British, US and Latin American culture wars from 1790 to the present. He will also examine how states such as Germany and the Netherlands have taken the concept up in the mediation of religious conflicts.

Victor Cova (v.s.cova rug.nl) is an anthropologist looking at the interface between political and social scientific uses of the concept “worldview”. He focuses on the translation of “worldview” as “cosmovisión” in Latin American intellectual and political life between 1950 and 1990, tracing its influence on contemporary Indigenous Rights discourse.

Hugo Hogenbirk (h.d.hogenbirk rug.nl) is a philosopher and computational linguist, who is applying historical semantics in order to analyze both public and elite uses of ‘worldview’. He focuses on the role “wereldbeschouwing” and “levensbeschouwing” played in the pillarization of Dutch society, as well as exploring the philosophical roots of worldview in German Idealism. 

Ana Fernandez-Aballi (a.fernandez-aballi.altamirano rug.nl) is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow engaged in a postdoctoral research project on “Ontological Diversity in Environmental Education.” This project explores whether a lack of consideration of ontological diversity is hindering the effectiveness of public environmental education. The case studies for her action research are Barcelona (Spain) and Havana (Cuba).

Public seminar series on “The Study and Theory of Worldview”

This monthly online seminar is open to scholars, students and the interested public. Each month during the academic year we invite a leading scholar to present their research on topics related to worldview.

For more information on the seminar series, or to receive periodic updates, please send an email to v.s.cova rug.nl 

To see the full schedule, click the button below:

Project Advisors