Research profile of the department

The Department of Educational Science's profile is characterised by the examination of extracurricular educational processes, the individual and collective careers of children, young people and adults in extracurricular contexts and the effects of social change on educational opportunities, experiences and outcomes over the life course. The Institute's research and teaching focuses in particular on the complex relationship between socially determined differences, social inequalities and educational disadvantages. In each of the Institute's six teaching and research areas, social differences and inequalities are empirically analysed and discussed with reference to internationally contoured traditions of critical educational thinking, social and cultural science approaches to the social construction of realities and theories of the development of individual agency and opportunities for participation. Contingent relations of difference such as gender and generational relations, inequalities determined by migration society, as well as class and body or those characterised by the difference dis/ability are addressed and analysed with regard to social and pedagogical possibilities for promoting the agency and participation of people affected by inequalities and exclusion.

The Institute is also characterised by a close interweaving of research and teaching, the combination of empirical analysis and theoretical explication as well as an interdisciplinary orientation, particularly in the direction of social, societal and cultural science disciplines. Within the university, the Institute's staff are actively involved in the interdisciplinary research focus "Cultural Encounters - Cultural Conflicts" and "Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Innsbruck" (CGI). In addition, they are founding members and still key players in three research centres (RCs) at the University of Innsbruck: FC "Education - Generation - Life Course" (in conjunction with the research focus "Economy, Politics and Society"), FC "Migration and globalisation"and FZ "Medical Humanities". They are also initiators and co-runners of two doctoral programmes (DK): DK "Dynamics of inequality and difference in the age of globalisation" and DK "Gender and gender relations in transformation: spaces - relations - representations".