The Albert Hofmann Institute for Physiochemical Sustainability (AHI) is a research institute located in the East Westphalian town of Vlotho, Germany. The AHI is concerned with the research and advancement of sustainable well-being.
The AHI was founded on 1.1.2020 by JD Rolfes in Vlotho. Since 10.10.2021 it is a dependent research institute of the Akademie zur Förderung physiochemicher Nachhaltigkeit (Academy for the Advancement of Physiochemical Sustainability).
The AHI takes its name from the chemist Albert Hofmann. Hofmann’s scientific expertise, coupled with his holistic approach, embodies a way of combining academic research, spirituality, and social participation. He combined high ethical and qualitative research claims, which perceive and explore the human being as a whole also in the context of their environment. Not least in order to remain faithful to these approaches and to comply with them, the research activities of the AHI are closely linked to Albert Hofmann’s community of heirs.
The main themes of the AHI are knowledge, sustainability and well-being. As a fundamental right of all people, the main objective of the institute is to make knowledge more understandable and accessible. In this context, the mediation between academic and non-academic discourses has a distinct position.
In the conceptual understanding of the AHI, knowledge does not only exist on a cognitive level, but is broadened by the concept of bodily knowledge to a holistic concept of knowledge. Based on this broadened conceptual understanding as well as a social claim critical of hierarchy, the AHI wants to question, break open and rethink concepts of science and research as well as logics of power relations within and outside the research landscape. The aim is to improve togetherness in the sense of solidarity for all and to make knowledge applicable beyond that, whereby the institute has set itself the transnational goal of sustainably improving well-being everywhere in the world.
The research landscape on individual well-being is very diverse. For example, since the beginning of the millennium there has been a dedicated journal published by publisher Springer, the Journal of Happiness Studies, which focuses primarily on the subjective, individual factors of well-being. The AHI also addresses the question of the extent to which systemic factors, such as the logic of the current economic and social system, contribute to individual and collective well-being.
Albert Hofmann Institute
for Physiochemical Sustainability
Albert-Schweitzer-Str. 22
D – 32602 Vlotho
Germany
