The DFG-Graduate Program 2227 Identity and Heritage offers outstanding doctoral students the opportunity to pursue a doctorate in a unique and interdisciplinary environment. The research areas involved include: historic preservation, architecture, architectural theory, building and urban design history, fine arts, heritage conservation, architectural and art history, cultural and media history, visual arts, landscape architecture, architectural sociology, spatial planning and spatial research, as well as urban planning. The working language of the group is German.

Contemporary debates about social values and orientation, aiming to provide new cultural and political foundations for the coherence of societies, usually recur to a concept which was, and still is, to be found in processes of nation building: the constitution of collective identities through an assumed unity of state, history, people, culture, and heritage. We aim to argue that the concepts of identity and heritage are interdependent, and that their relations and meanings are neither stable, nor permanent. Rather, in the context of community building, uncertain relationships and ambiguities are characteristic of the conflict-permeated fields of identification and appropriation of cultural heritage.

In a collaborative endeavor between the Technical University Berlin, the Bauhaus-University Weimar, the Fachhochschule Erfurt University of Applied Sciences and the Hochschule Anhalt Dessau University of Applied Sciense, the Research Training Group Identity and Heritage conducts critical research about processes of social appropriation and interpretation as they relate to buildings, artifacts, historical sites, and other material elements of cultural tradition. The group aims to develop a model for interdisciplinary critical cultural heritage studies and, on this basis, a cultural heritage theory that combines participatory and democratic heritage interpretation with the detailed observation and interpretation of the material qualities of objects.