Ethics, Social Justice and Sustainability

Educational discourse, practice and research has traditionally been shaped by strong moral motives, the normative-ethical background of which has remarkably been little analyzed. Not least against the background of pressing global questions of sustainability, research at the Department historically and systematically addresses this moralizing underpinning that has made education into a cultural, social and institutional practice in which the solution to social problems in particular and the future of people in general are negotiated.

In this context, our research assumes that, at the individual level, this educational demand is characterized by both, strategies of empowerment, which are intended to enable future citizens to participate successfully in social change and progress, and by so-called moralization strategies, which demand that citizens also develop into virtuous members of society. This has recently become clear in media education, where special media competence is demanded and promoted against the background of moral panic concerning the Internet, social media and artificial intelligence.

Additionally, we examine how, at the institutional level, these moral expectations have been transformed into the demand that schools compensate for social inequalities. We approach this by learning to understand the different grounds of discrimination, such as ethnicity, origin, gender, disability, age, religion, migration or refugee history, and by developing appropriate teaching and pedagogical tools to eliminate these discriminations in formal, informal, and non-formal socialization and learning settings.

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