Praxeologies and Homeostases - On the Foundation of Media Pedagogics in Social Science

Coordinator: Univ. Prof. Dr. Christian Swertz

Team: Mag. Alessandro Barberi

Funding: FWF

Duration: 1.5.2016 - 30.4.2019

Content:

In the debates within media pedagogy, the need for an action-oriented media pedagogy has been stressed by different parties. These arguments are explicitly based on media pedagogy as an action theory, which, in the German-speaking world, has strong links to the debate between Niklas Luhmann’s System Theory and Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory, which is also the base of Baacke’s habilitation.

More recently, a stronger interest in and reception of French action theory have begun to assert themselves – namely Pierre Bourdieu’s praxeology –, which focuses on questions of social inequality and limitations or social constraints of given agents. These findings coincide for the most parts with the results of Pierre Bourdieu’s praxeological sociology of education, which is why discussions of media habitus promise a theoretical linking of German action theory and French praxeology. In the sense of a socio-scientific foundation of media pedagogics, this project therefore starts out from the point where an action theoretical and praxeological media pedagogy is already being broadly discussed. The aim of this project is to collate the German and French histories of social sciences regarding action theory and praxeology. The research questions are:  

  1. How can an action-theoretical foundation of media pedagogics be argued on the basis of these German debates?
  2. Given the French debates, how may a praxeological foundation of media pedagogy be argued?
  3. How may the discussion on media habitus be enriched, from the perspective of basic research, by action theory or praxeology in the sense of a critique of society and within the framework of a socio-scientific foundation of media pedagogy? 

This project proposes to apply a historical epistemology/epistemological critique and discourse analysis in the sense of a praxeological/action theoretical sociology of knowledge in order to simultaneously explore and theoretically premise French praxeology in the sense of Bourdieu and action theory in the sense of Habermas.