The Language of Recgonition: Empirical Reconstructions of Addressing Processes in High School Lessons from the Perspective of Subjection Theory

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Norbert Ricken; Professorin Dr. Nadine Rose
• Subject Area: Education Systems and Educational Institutions ; General Education and History of Education
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 234610425

This project is part of a project cluster that develops an empirically based pedagogical theory of recognition. The project starts from the observation that recognition is highly relevant within the educational discipline, on the one hand, and that it remains quite vague, on the other hand. On these grounds the project empirically analyses the significance of recognition in and for school lessons by investigating its performance and effects. In contrast to the widespread view that regards recognition pre-dominantly as appreciating action this project refers back to an analytically configured concept of recognition. This concept - hitherto developed mostly in theoretical terms - works from the connection of recognition to social practices and processes of subjection. The project investigates the linguistic dimension of recognition in school lessons at the high school level by focusing on how students and teachers 'are addressed' during the lessons. The analysis of how students and teachers 'are addressed' is very fruitful for the reconstruction of the linguistic dimension of recognition, because the ways of being addressed can be observed ethnographically and analysed by conversation and discourse analysis, more specifically its forms, structures, and effects. We assume that the empirical reconstruction of addressing practices provides insights into the processes of recognition and of subjection and into how the latter unfold in pedagogical practices. Thus, the project examines ethnographically and videographically how teachers and students relate to one another in speech acts, how they mutually assign subject positions in these speech acts and how they establish (possibly specific pedagogical) regimes/orders of recognizability.The theoretical aim of the project is to disclose the significance of recognition in and for pedagogical practices and to reconstruct empirically and in a differentiated manner the significance of language as the medium of recognition. Therefore, the project makes an important contribution to the advancement of qualitative school research, on the one hand, and to a subject-oriented research of education/Bildung, on the other hand, insofar as it brings into view the significance of recognition for processes of subjection in schooling via the addressing practices.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants