Transnational Discourses on Education – Focus on Religion

• Applicant: Dr. Zrinka Stimac
• Subject Area: Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: from 2018 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 411557257

In the current project, analyses have been planned and carried out so far that consider religion in the educational segment of the international organizations, respectively UNESCO, OSCE/ODIHR and the Council of Europe (CoE). Of interest are the a) normative concepts and b) the didactic educational designs, which are linked to different objectives. First, the reconstruction of the new or redefined field of activity of international organizations, which in each case was established from a certain point in time as a new focus of work of the studied organizations. Thereby, it is of interest to see which developments can be identified in the studied organizations with regard to the perception of religion in the education segment in the diachronic course. Second, the use and change of the concept of religion over time as well as the range of thematized religions and worldviews since 1950 were reconstructed to a large extent. Since the change of the concept of religion, especially at UNESCO, coincides with the change of the concept of culture, the latter has been elaborated as well. This includes the foreshortening and functionalization of religion in different political contexts. Third, fundamental changes in the framework of educational work were elaborated, as well as the approaches that can be found in the leading documents of all the organizations mentioned. This includes not only the often-mentioned "teaching about religion", but also fundamental didactic approaches that enable the interweaving of religion and school education in global discourse. In the currently requested period of six months, a) two field visits to the documentation centers of international organizations will be undertaken, b) interviews will be made, transcribed and analyzed, c) the results of the interview analyses will be interlaced with the previous results and d) newly gained results will be written up. With this last step, the project explicitly addresses the differently situated tensions and questions that arise from both the theoretical foundations and the qualitative and quantitative data, but cannot be answered from them.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants