Digitalisation as de-subjectivization? On a redefinition of subject orientation in religious education

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Bernhard Grümme
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 510649910

The envisaged research project brings two focal points of contemporary religious education into a constellation that results in a highly dynamic and complex research desideratum. This will be addressed in this project: On the one hand, religious education struggles to redefine subject orientation in the face of growing heterogeneity, secularisation and singularisation. In addition, there are insights into processes of subjectivation, which, in the decline to post-structuralist and discourse-theoretical formatting, fundamentally request an emphatic speech of the subject. At the same time, however, the normative determinations of religious education practices to be a language school of freedom and thus an order oriented towards autonomy mark the indispensability of a sustainable concept of the subject. On the other hand, religious education sees itself massively challenged by the processes of digitalisation. On the one hand, this holds the not inconsiderable correlation-didactic potential of a reference to the lifeworld and offers diverse didactic opportunities, including the enabling of theology-producing, subject-guided practices. On the other hand, de-subjectifying effects such as the hegemonic and stratifying formation of difference, reification, virtualisation, simulation of affects, entities and identities or commodification are obvious. If the RE is understood from its theological profile as a trial sojourn in religious worlds, these aspects certainly hold problematic implications for a subject-oriented inside perspective of the participants. The aim of the research proposal results from the constellation of these two research discourses. It is concerned with reformulating subject orientation under the conditions of digitalisation in a religious education order based on educational theory and understood as a language school of freedom. To this end, the theory of Enlightened Heterogeneity, established by the applicant in the discourse of religious education on the basis of alterity theory and oriented towards praxeology, is to serve as a hermeneutic horizon. It appreciates the subjects in their identity constructions and practices, and yet, at the same time, is able to analyse de-subjectifying as well as liberating, empowering moments of digital communication processes. It also critically and constructively deals with the normativity of religious education in digitality, which is grounded in freedom theory. The aim is to develop a reflexive concept of subject orientation that can elucidate the praxeological mechanisms of digitalisation in an ideology-critical way and define them pedagogically as well as didactically. In the process, it reflects its own reifying and differentiating practices.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants