Visual Education

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Andrea Sabisch; Privatdozent Dr. Jörg Sternagel
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 464609650

The focus of the interdisciplinary project Visual Education derives from approaches of pedagogy and research on education on the one hand and cultural, social and media philosophy on the other hand. It is based on an understanding of images as medial, here: imagery infrastructures of genetic experience that shape our relation to ourselves and the world. Despite of the differentiation of the medial in theories of pedagogy, one desideratum of research consists of analyzing how specific images constitute and change our seeing. The proposed research project starts at this point and investigates the constitutive and modal (i.e. shaping, orienting) dimension of specific images for processes of imaging. The research question is: How can the constitutive and modal dimension of imagery be presented and reflected? It shifts the focus from what is experi-enced to how and by what it is experienced. Without mediality, here: imagery one does not see anything, as vice versa, the mediality, here: imagery itself remains invisible in ordinary seeing. They develop a complicated interplay between visibility, invisibility, and making visible. In order to investigate this interplay, the project chooses a phenomenological approach to images that enables a showing thinking via bodily experience in dealing with images leading to an approach, where definition, argumentation and systematics do not exclusively dominate the field, but where specific medial arrangements of the visible can be analyzed in case studies, enabling theories to be developed further. Here, specific actualizations of visual education are investigated, based on concrete artistic works and empirical material, in order to ask questions of media specific possibilities of reflectivity and transferability. The planned result of the research is to uncover ethical, social, cultural and artistic forms, processes, and dynamics of imagery, lifting responsive moments of surprise, anticipating, occuring, irritation, the confrontation with the unknown, the demand, the acknowledgement of the other, the reflection of the experience of the alien in contrast to the experience of the self.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Belgium
• Cooperation Partner: Dr. Volkmar Mühleis