Current Research Projects
PI: Hans Schildermans (FWF-Projekt)
A University for the People. Colonial Frictions, Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Creation of the Future
(ESP 365 ESPRIT-Programm)
01.09.2023 bis 31.08.2026
Universities play an important role in shaping tomorrow's society. Both through research and education, universities contribute to addressing current social needs. Increasingly, higher education policies at different levels (institutional, national, European) are trying to affect how universities shape the society of the future. In doing so, the depiction of the university as an ivory tower is often strongly criticized. By means of various measures, policy actors try to realize a "university for the people".
The desire to orient universities more strongly to the needs of the people is not new and has a long history. More specifically, countries whose histories are characterized by colonial oppression, often experimented post-independence with new forms of university education that claimed to be better adjusted to the needs of the local population so that these reformed universities contributed to the development of these new nation-states. However, these histories have often been neglected in the dominant historiography of the university in favor of a rather Eurocentric narrative that culminates in the idea of the global university in a knowledge economy. Therefore, focusing more strongly on these postcolonial histories of university reform also offers an opportunity to criticize the narrative of the university as an eminently European institution. The three case studies that take center stage in this project are the land-grant movement in the USA (1862-1890), the Cordoba student movement in Argentina (1918-1930), and open and distance education in South Africa (1946-1980).
In each of these three reform movements, a particular idea of the university was proposed to meet the needs of the population to realize a specific vision of the future. For each of the case studies, the project asks how ideas of the university were articulated and implemented in conjunction with desirable representations of the future and a particular, politically colored understanding of "the people." In this way, the research project intervenes from a historical-comparative perspective in contemporary political and academic debates about the future of the university and its relation to society.
PI: Daniel Tröhler
Title: Nation state, curriculum and the fabrication of national-minded citizens
Goal: Understanding historically and comparatively how curricula are designed to create in every future citizen a more or less silent cognitive reservoir of national literacy or nationalism that can easily be retrieved and actualized in particular contexts perceived as endangering the respective nation-states.
Time frame: 2017-2021
Project student assistant: Veronika Maricic, BA
Publications, paper presentations: u:cris Portal and
Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel_Troehler
PI: Viktoria Boretska
Title: Johnny’s teaching machine in Ivan’s classroom: Travelling technologies and cultural conceptions of education in the Soviet Union during the Cold War
Goal: Based on the case of 'global appeal' for programmed instruction technology in the 1960s, the aim is to explore the cultural translation of this 'ultimate objective teaching method', thereby revising the thesis of harmonisation in education and shedding light on national, historical, and cultural aspects of classroom scientification processes.
Time frame: 2014-2018
Title: Framing the National Mind of Students through History and Historiography: The Prussian Wars and the Historiographical Narratives of Germany, Denmark, Austria, and France, from the 1880s-1990s (PhD project)
Goal: To see the Big Picture of how historiography (the writing of history) and school subjects like history and geography were used for framing the national mind of students. A comparative trajectory view from the Long 19th Century through the 20th century.
Time frame: 2017-2021
PI: Catherina Schreiber
Title: The Liturgy of Schooling. A Historical Analysis in Cross-National Contact and Conflict Zones
Goal of the project is to theorize schooling as a modern (nation-state) liturgy at hand of an empirical historical analysis in several border regions. Starting point are adaptations of schooling in border regions with territorial changes after the First World War (Saar area, South Tyrol, Schleswig, Trieste/Istria…)
Time Framae: 2017-2023
Researchgate: www.researchgate.net/profile/Catherina_Schreiber
Academia.edu
Title: Ideological preferences and historiographical biases – Johann Ignaz Felbiger, the„Normal method“ and histories of education
Goal: In reconstructing the path of the Silesian abbot Johann Ignaz Felbiger and his so-called “Normal method” as "conceptual personae", the project seeks to analyze – both historiographically and historically – how certain ideological preferences and the emergence of a canon of selected “heroes” in “histories of education” were able to silence other historical actors whose works possibly had an even larger purview.
Time frame: 2017-2021
