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 research project which brings two focal points of contemporary religious education into a constellation that results in a complex research desideratum, is to be finalized (compared to the focus of the initial application here now) by deepening and expanding it. On the one hand, religious education struggles to redefine subject orientation in the face of growing heterogeneity, secularization and singularization. In addition, there are insights into subjectivation processes. 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 digitalization. On the one hand, this harbors the not insignificant potential of a lifeworld reference and theology-producing, subject-led practices in terms of correlation didactics. On the other hand, de-subjectivizing effects are obvious. The constellation of these two research discourses now results in the aim of the continuation proposal. It aims to deepen, expand and finally conclude the project, which intends to reformulate subject orientation under the conditions of digitalization in an educational theory-based religious pedagogical order understood as a language school of freedom. To this end, the hermeneutical horizon is to be provided by the form of thought of Enlightened Heterogeneity, established by the applicant in the religious education discourse, which is based on the theory of alterity and oriented towards praxeology. It acknowledges the subjects in their identity constructions and practices, and yet is able to analyze both de-subjectifying and liberating, empowering moments of digital communication processes and to critically and constructively update them with regard to the normativity of religious education in digitality based on freedom theory. A reflexive concept of subject orientation is to be developed (also in a deepening undertaken in the course of the writing), which can clarify the praxeological mechanisms of digitization in an ideology-critical way and profile them pedagogically and didactically, while at the same time clarifying its own reifying and difference-setting practices. This, of course, must (in an extension section) expose itself to its own probation in fields of religious education in post-digitality and reflexively clarify it.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants