Subject fields

Historical anthropology researches the cultural shaping of existential areas of human existence in their process of historical change. Among other things, it ties in with questions of the history of mentality and everyday life, is not a separate discipline and its research is conducted within individual disciplines. Educational Sciences play a special role here because education and training are orientated towards implicit images of humanity, which are inevitably based on anthropological assumptions. Research in historical anthropology emphasises the radical historicity and cultural nature of the subject matter and investigation, is transdisciplinary in nature, requires a variety of methods and is based on a fundamental openness of history, which is always related to the present.

The emergence of anthropology is initially linked to the rise of scientific medicine in the Renaissance. Until the first half of the 20th century, it focussed on (brain) anatomical research, among other things, from which a biologistic view of man was derived. This anthropology was ultimately permeated by the psychiatric theory of degeneration and the Darwinian theory of selection associated with it, as well as 19th century racial theories.

Despite the distinction made since the end of the 18th century between physiological and pragmatic anthropology with an emphasis on the historical-cultural character in connection with the civilisation and cultivation of humanity, the idea of a naturally given and unchangeable human condition persisted. It was not until a paradigm shift in the second half of the 20th century that the mysteriousness, complexity and sociality of human life and also its endangerment increasingly took centre stage.

This shift in perspective has been accompanied by a loss of significance of normative anthropologies, which in recent decades has led to the creation of a dynamic, openly developing field of research that dispenses with an overall interpretation of the human being in favour of the inclusion of heterogeneous aspects. In this context, there are a number of studies on educational anthropology as a field of work in general Educational Sciences.

Pedagogical anthropology and historical anthropology are intertwined (cf. publications), so that one can speak of a historical-pedagogical anthropology that assumes a historically developed, reciprocal relationship between pedagogy and anthropology: ideas of upbringing and education have always been linked to anthropological concepts and anthropological ideas must be related to developments brought about by upbringing, education and socialisation. A central focus here is childhood in its historical transformation and the interrelationship between social constructions of childhood and real childhood experiences. These relationship levels are analysed in their dependence on transformation processes of motherhood and fatherhood, socio-political ideas and economic developments from pre-modern times to the present.

Another area of research is corporeality and the body in terms of its different cultural codings and accentuations. The underlying concept of the body is a corpus absconditus that can only be conceptualised in relation to its context. Due to its complexity and the complexity of the processes of abstraction and visualisation associated with it, the human body ultimately eludes complete cognition. This makes the question of the representation and performative character of social and cultural actions or the practical knowledge of exposed bodies more important.

With the introduction of the ethnographic view of culture and history, anthropological research, e.g. on the relationship between "the foreign" and "one's own", between alterity and cultural diversity, takes on a new quality. This area of tension can be exemplified using the example of the mountain. It offers the perspective of an experience that is paradoxical and therefore difficult to translate. The materiality of the mountain is encountered at best as an embodied mind and this strong concept of human presence is based on self-waste. This is an anti-economic attitude, which - in view of the real presence of a mountain and for one's own safety - would still have to be combined with an economy of withdrawal when it comes to reconstructing the relationship between nature and culture.

In addition, the process of medicalisation of the body forms a central thematic area that deals with the standardisation of the body, sexuality, birth, dying and death through modern medicine as a normative discipline. The complex system of relationships between magical worlds of imagination, religion and natural science continue to guide the cultural shaping of these areas in the modern age.

Historical educational and social research deals with educational and educationally relevant issues on the basis of historical sources and a repertoire of historical and social science methods. This includes discourse analysis, source criticism and interpretation as well as oral history and biographical research. The focus in Innsbruck is on childhood history and historical youth research. We are currently focussing in particular on the institutional history of extra-familial forms of education (history of residential schools and boarding schools) and the transformation of welfare regimes. A second focus on site concerns the history of science. We are primarily concerned with bio-socio-medical knowledge formation, the medico-pedagogical field of its various applications and the normative connections in parts of contemporary (social) pedagogy. The aim of the work is to make a sociological-praxeological contribution to the analysis of the structural change of the subject.

Ulrich Leitner and Michaela Ralser

Our projects

• International D-A-CH Lead Agency Project (FWF): Negotiating Educational Spaces in Residential Care 1970 - 1990. An Interdisciplinary Comparison of Transformation Processes in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Information under: https://www.uibk.ac.at/newsroom/internationales-forschungsprojekt-zur-heimerziehung.html.de
• Habilitation project: The Space of the Boarding School. An educational-historical study of Catholic institutional education using the example of the episcopal boys' seminaries in Tyrol. Information under: http://www.uibk.ac.at/iezw/internatsforschung/
• In recent years, research on the structural and social history of the major institutions of public (substitute) education has taken place under the headings "Regime of Welfare" and "Medicalised Childhoods": https://www.uibk.ac.at/iezw/heimgeschichteforschung/
• Closely linked to this debate is research into early child psychiatry and curative education: in the form of the so-called child observation centres in Austria during the Second Republic. The focus here is on the genealogy and epistemology of curative and home education. Information at: https://www.uibk.ac.at/iezw/forschungen-zur-kinderbeobachtungsstation/ and at: http://www.psychiatrische-landschaften.net/

Another thematic and methodological focus of the teaching and research area is conceptual theory and discourse analysis approaches to the key terms of the Educational Sciences discipline, above all "education". Conceptual work with regard to meanings and shifts in connotation in social (in addition to educational policy, also socio-economic and socio-cultural) discourses of the recent past and present represent an important Research Area, whose research interest is primarily aimed at determining the content of a horizon of understanding of "education" that proves to be robust in the face of functional appropriations in the sense of an economisation and commodification of the educational system and concept. The contemporary redefinition of the humanistic and critical-emancipatory content of education is just as much a prerequisite for this as critical diagnoses of the times.

Beyond such conceptual-theoretical, philosophical, historical and ideology-critical approaches, however, it is also a central concern of the LuF to examine the processes and lifeworlds of upbringing and education more closely with regard to conducive and inhibiting criteria. The focus is therefore on heterodox social contexts and spaces of experience in which and through which educational processes are (or can be) initiated and promoted.

(Cf.: Lederer, Bernd [ed.] [2010]: Taking part and having part. Football from the perspective of critical fans and social scientists. Göttingen: Die Werkstatt)

Last but not least, the research endeavours at the LuF also focus on practical methods and didactic approaches of an interdisciplinary nature, which are suitable for accompanying successful learning, reflection and educational processes.

References

The concept of aesthetic education, which first emerged in the 18th century, is an answer to the old question of the effects of beauty and owes its historical origins to the liberation from the heteronomous purposes of morality and conceptual cognition.

This liberation also affects the position of the subject: It is the subject of an aesthetic experience insofar as it produces and shapes educational processes. At the same time, however, it always finds itself as part of a context or object of a counterpart to which it leaves itself to experience and over which it does not have complete control. Aesthetic experience is therefore not only an active achievement in the sense of researching, exploring, shaping or analysing world and self-relationships, but it is always also an "achievement" in the passive sense of engaging with, encountering and becoming aware of, touching, affecting, feeling and not understanding.

In relation to the abstract nature of academic thought and work, this means that in addition to the purely cognitive orientation, the physical-sensual and situational-scenic reality and practice must also be taken into account, thereby establishing a connection to what underlies all perception, memory, comprehension and understanding. Research into aesthetic education and experience thus contributes to the foundations of human life and is therefore also one of the foundations of the subject (Sources) and will now be explained in more detail by way of example.

University as a place of boundary and transition

At university, not only are theories and methods learnt and a basic moral, political and economic orientation acquired, but an overall habitus of life is also shaped, which concerns the formation of taste as well as the extent and forms of shaping and self-education. Those who study at university also and above all experience themselves in the confrontation with their own and others' products and works, which includes both - experiences of security, wholeness and completion and experiences of indeterminacy, discontinuity and disruption. One response on the part of teaching would be, for example, to try out new forms of presentation and mediation that are inextricably linked to research and consistently consider the conditions of knowledge production. If, in the end, the conflicting elements were to be brought together to form a unit of action and experience, then only from the perspective that the process and the form are not precisely planned and the result can only be calculated to a limited extent (Sources).

Field of reference 1: Mountain and extreme sports

Mountain and extreme sports generally take place on the fringes of culture, in nature. This spatial segregation makes it even more difficult to plan and calculate and increases the pressure for justification. As a result, the question of judgement formation comes to the fore. However, certainty does not come into a judgement through separation, but through the combination of sensory and rational faculties. Their interaction and interlocking produces states of presence of varying intensity, which cannot be grasped in the usual categories of body / mind. Only when the dichotomy collapses can a maximum of security be achieved in the realisation of these practices apart from habit. Strictly speaking, nothing extraordinary appears in the states of strong presence, but rather the ordinary can be remembered through them, namely the peculiarity of the human being to be embodied mind (Sources).

Field of reference 2: Art and nature

The third and, for the time being, last field of reference is art in relation to nature and in the sense of the performative production of materiality. It centres on the question of the conditions, possibilities, limits and effects of aesthetic experience. As a gift that gives and takes and as a threshold experience that can lead to transformations, aesthetic experience once again raises the general question of what experience is and could be today. Experience is tentatively understood as a complex event that organises the transitions between sensual and rational faculties, uses the body as a medium and foundation of knowledge and consistently strives for representation (Sources).

Helga Peskoller

Education and upbringing are two central concepts of Educational Sciences that can be used to illustrate issues in the philosophy of education and upbringing: What do we mean by "education"? When is one educated? What is the relationship between education and knowledge? What is meant by education? Who educates? Who may/can/should/must educate? How can educational desires and educational measures be legitimised? These questions are closely linked to questions about generational relationships, about the subject, about pedagogical fields of action, etc.

Philosophy of education combines philosophical-theoretical frameworks and methods of empirical research and thus opposes the factually unfounded dichotomy between empirical science and fundamental reflection. This is closely linked to epistemological and scientific-theoretical questions of Educational Sciences research, for example the question of how a narrowing of general Educational Sciences thinking can be opened up.

In Innsbruck, we also take up these central topics of educational philosophy in our research and teaching and focus on them again through our questions and assignments. These include, in particular, aesthetic forms of access and challenges for theory formation in the face of disciplinary (re)localisations.

We would like to draw particular attention to the following publications:

• Fuchs, Thorsten; Jehle, May; Krause, Sabine (eds.) (2013): Normativity and normative (in) pedagogy. Applications of Theoretical Educational Sciences III. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
• Krause, Sabine (2021): Doing theory along disciplinary boundaries: Working with photographs. In: Thompson, Christiane; Brinkmann, Malte, Rieger-Ladich, Markus (eds. inside): Practices and Forms of Theory. Weinheim/Basel: Beltz Juventa, pp. 260-279.
• Krause, Sabine; Breinbauer, Ines M. (eds.) (2015): In the Space of the Green Deployments of Theoretical Educational Sciences IV. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
• Lohwasser, Diana (2015): "It is life, nothing else." Existenz in bildungsstheoretischer Hinsicht bei Camus, Cioran und Lé Dissertationsschrift, University of Cologne.
• Lohwasser, Diana (2019): The educator as manager: A critical reflection. In: Quarterly Journal for Scientific Pedagogy 95, 4/2019, pp. 517-530.
• Reinhartz, Petra (1996): From difference to idemicity? Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
• Reinhartz, Petra (2001): On the old and new magic of education. Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt Research.
• Reinhartz, Petra (2009): Bilder-Räume in ihrer Bedeutung für Bildungsprozesse, in: Bild-Bildung-Argumentation, ed. by Karl Helmer, Gaby Herchert and Sascha Löwenstein. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 201-211.