How do school subjects constitute themselves and how do they mutually produce each other in the practices of teaching? This is how the central questions of this DFG project can be summarised in a nutshell.

Against this background, particular attention is paid to the concept of recognition. In order to make recognition practices empirically accessible, we operationalise them as addressings: The aim is to investigate how pupils and teachers use or confirm each other as subjects in acts of address by turning to each other both linguistically and non-linguistically, for example through a fleeting touch, a raised eyebrow, a slight nod of the head or by means of verbal addresses. Addresses in the classroom can thus be described as requests to become someone you were not before; they therefore always have an ascriptive character. Recognition is therefore not understood as articulated appreciation, but can also have a degrading or ostracising effect; recognition as a 'truant', a 'slob' or a 'class clown' is just as observable in the classroom as the production of the 'hard-working' or 'gifted' pupil subject in the act of addressing.

However, recognition practices are by no means understood as one-dimensional processes in which, for example, teachers 'influence' pupils, but rather we conceptualise recognition as a multi-layered interaction process embedded in a specific setting, in the often conflict-laden course of which the teacher is also produced as a 'companionable', 'authoritarian' or 'distracted' teacher subject.

At the centre of our analyses are not only verbal acts of address, but our practice-theoretical focus is primarily on physical interactions in the material setting of the school. One aim of this project is to shed light on the significance of the body for recognition and thus subjectivation in social practices. Methodologically, we view the body as a surface on which implicit norms of recognisability are revealed; postures, gestures or gazes that can be interpreted as signs thus come into focus as subtle acts of address.

Physical education is a particularly suitable field for researching the physicality of recognition processes, as subject-specific norms, corrections and evaluations relate directly to bodies and their movements. The observations made in physical education lessons have sharpened our awareness of the physicality of recognition, making it possible to shed light on its dimension even in subjects where physicality initially seems to play hardly any role in recognition issues. From this perspective, a busy fountain pen, a glance at the blackboard that suggests concentration or gesticulation that conveys sovereignty can be examined as physical techniques of a subject form that is recognised as successful in the school setting, just like a perfectly formed somersault in sports lessons. We assume that there are different frames of reference in the various subjects, which are expressed in different physical performances.

Certain (power) relationships are always established in the networks of (re-)addresses: The mutually addressing actors create an order of interaction with institutionally conceded subject positions, to which different scopes, possibilities and evaluations are always linked. The project makes a contribution to the question of the reproduction of inequality relations in educational institutions insofar as physical addressing touches people in their deep layers, which are difficult to access reflexively, so that considerable consequences for the opening and limitation of educational and learning processes are to be expected.