Research focus

Focus on Globalisation and Education

Education and personal development are considered to be key factors for the development and cohesion of society today more than ever. Interactions between social transformation processes and education are examined in the area of "General Education Science." The following questions form the horizon of our research:

Pedagogical knowledge
How are pedagogical knowledge and its science changing? Who are the determining actors? How are research fields, key conceptual concerns and epistemologies changing?

Patterns of interpretation
How are patterns of interpretation which legitimise our actions changing? Which patterns of interpretation are becoming dominant and which counter-movements can be identified?

Capacity to act
What do these evolving knowledge(s) and interpretation patterns mean for the capacity of individuals, groups and social movements to act?

We understand education and personal development as a "social fact." In this sense, education science is a critical social theory that examines the reproduction of society and possibilities for change. Special attention is paid to structural categories such as race, class and gender, which are of particular importance for the regulation and reorganisation of power structures.

Academic staff

Focus on Childhood and Youth

 Childhood and youth research is a transdisciplinary field of research which uses heterogeneous theoretical perspectives and social science methods to reconstruct the social, societal, economic, political and ecological conditions of (ways of) ‘producing’ childhood and youth.

The research activities and the curriculum offered in the study area are positioned in this research field with a life-phase-related perspective of education research. It focuses on the contemporary conditions of the rearing? or development? of children and young people and analyses them in the context of their pedagogical institutionalisation – in connection with central categories of difference such as generation, class, gender and ethnicity. The question of how education takes place in childhood and youth is related to the question of the processes of socialisation of younger generations, and therefore also to the issues of "generational ordering", autonomy, agency and vulnerability.

The area of study uses various resources for education knowledge production, in order to realise this programme: In addition to theoretically ambitious empirical research, the focus is also on the analysis of different procedures, methodologies and epistemologies of qualitative and quantitative social research.

Academic staff