Charlotta Cordes is a research associate in the joint project Mod-Block-DDR and her dissertationdeals with the mental construction of the Lausitz since the 1970s. The historical (industrial) region has been confronted with structural change not only since the coal phase-out. The project examines how political actors from socialism to the market economy perceived and shaped it. The dissertation project is being carried out in cooperation between the Department of Business Studies and Economics (Prof. Dr. Jutta Günther) and the Research Centre for Eastern Europe (Prof. Dr. Susanne Schattenberg).

BIGSSS is an international graduate school jointly run by the University of Bremen and Jacobs University in Bremen. It is one of the leading international graduate schools in the field of empirical social science research in Germany.