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New approaches to research on philanthropy have deepened the understanding of giving behavior. They include the ascent of field experiments on fundraising where charities are perceived as active parties. Others include the influence of behavioral economics on our understanding of how social interactions affect donations. The channels through which people donate have recently changed as well. For example, the role of online activities like donation-based crowdfunding is increasing.

The conjuncture of a number of historical forces, operating at several different time scales, conspires to create a crisis in expert knowledge and in “knowing” more broadly. These forces include unidirectional phenomena like the social democratization of education, the development of automated forms of knowing, the imposition of neoliberal management on the world of expertise, and the drift away from discursive towards imagistic embodiments of knowledge.

How to best stimulate, foster and sustain science environments in Africa has become crucial for both research funding organizations and individual researchers across all disciplines. Public and private funders have experimented with new formats to enhance research capacities of African scientists, ranging from individual fellowships over institutional capacity-building and new collaborative programs to policy dialogues. Numerous global challenges and policy agendas such as the sustainable development goals underline the urgency of these efforts.

This course offers an applied introduction to mediation analysis, which deals with the question of whether the effect of an independent variable on a dependent variable is explained via one or more mediating variables. While still most popular in psychology, mediation analysis gets increasingly more attention in other disciplines of social sciences. This course teaches the basic assumptions and models of mediation analysis and gives a brief introduction in moderated mediation and advanced mediation models such as longitudinal- and multilevel mediation models.