Speaker team

Prof. Dr. Thomas Alkemeyer

Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg Institute for Sports Science Ammerländer Heerstraße 114-118
26129 Oldenburg

+49 441/798-4622

Prof. Dr. Martin Butler

Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg Institute of English and American Studies Ammerländer Heerstraße 114-118
26129 Oldenburg

 +49 441/798-2320

Coordination

Marta Mazur

Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg
Faculty III
PhD programme "Gestalten der Zukunft"
Ammerländer Heerstraße 114-118
26129 Oldenburg

Project funding

running time

October 2019 to September 2025

Concept

Thematic focus and perspective

Digitalisation is one of the most hotly debated topics of the present. Images, visions and figures (“Gestalten”) of a digital future can be found in all areas of society – in education, which is preparing for the future with new curricula, virtual methods, and corresponding media (Dräger/Müller-Eiselt 2018); in the health sector, where digital technologies and measurement procedures promise improved methods of treatment and prevention (Haring 2018; cf. also the Federal Government’s initiative “E-Health - Digitalisation in the Health Care System”); in the economy, where the necessity of digitalisation is justified by the preservation of competitiveness (Huber 2018) and better revenues (cf., e.g., the DIHK’s statement on digitalisation as a “growth engine for the economy”); in the field of politics, where the government is defining guidelines for digital policy with a “digital agenda” and the trade unions are calling for digitalisation to be organised in a way that is fair to employees (cf., e.g., the statements of the DGB’s specialist department “Digital Workplaces and Work Environment Reporting” set up in 2014), etc.

more

Digitalisation is one of the most hotly debated topics of the present. Images, visions and figures (“Gestalten”) of a digital future can be found in all areas of society – in education, which is preparing for the future with new curricula, virtual methods, and corresponding media (Dräger/Müller-Eiselt 2018); in the health sector, where digital technologies and measurement procedures promise improved methods of treatment and prevention (Haring 2018; cf. also the Federal Government’s initiative “E-Health - Digitalisation in the Health Care System”); in the economy, where the necessity of digitalisation is justified by the preservation of competitiveness (Huber 2018) and better revenues (cf., e.g., the DIHK’s statement on digitalisation as a “growth engine for the economy”); in the field of politics, where the government is defining guidelines for digital policy with a “digital agenda” and the trade unions are calling for digitalisation to be organised in a way that is fair to employees (cf., e.g., the statements of the DGB’s specialist department “Digital Workplaces and Work Environment Reporting” set up in 2014), etc.

As differently as the term digitalisation is used in these areas to describe a transformation process that is also radically changing everyday life and the reaction  to which must be measures of future-oriented control and design, as varied are the expectations of the future that cause these measures and in which they are inscribed. Some observers associate digitalisation with the beginning of “a new era in which computers will take over demanding tasks from knowledge workers and well paid jobs will be eliminated” (Der Spiegel 3 Sep. 2016, p. 12; our translation), thus, a “Rise of the Robots” (Ford 2016), in which critics see an “attack on our freedom” (Welzer 2016; our translation). Others, on the contrary, positively assess digitalisation as an “engine of (economic) progress in contemporary society” (Der Spiegel Wissen 26 Apr. 2016; our translation). Still others defend the “digital modernity” against culturally pessimistic criticism of modernity as the scene not only of an “egalitarian structural change of the public sphere”, but also of a rethinking and change in attitudes, in which the “longing for a resonant world relationship” is articulated (Der Spiegel 28 May 2016, p. 132f.; our translation). The discourses and practices, the policies and technologies of digitalisation thus build the core of diverse, competing, sometimes even contradictory future images and scenarios, of more or less popular utopias and dystopias (cf. “Verteufelt nicht das Digitale” [Guest article by Heinrich Bedford-Strohm], in: Die Zeit, No. 45, 31 Oct. 2018; or Precht 2018). They are carriers and driving forces of euphoric and apocalyptic expectations of the future, of promises and worst-case scenarios, of positive and negative affects (cf., e.g., Butler 2015) – up to reflections on a “digital ontology” that asks for the significance of digitalisation as a horizon of the determination of human existence (Capurro 2017; Volkens/Anderson 2017).

The PhD programme aims to critically and reflexively observe and accompany the many-voiced web of images and expectations, of hopes and fears that revolves around the concept, techniques, and practices of digitalisation and that triggers various measures, e.g., with regard to economic and educational policies. In order to do this, it adopts a meta-perspective on digitalisation processes informed by the humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences. Its guiding interest is based on the observations that 1. ‘digitalisation’ has become a buzzword for highly disparate, positive and negative projections and visions of the future in recent years, and 2. that the expectations, imaginations and narratives connected to processes of ‘digitalisation’ unfold their own dynamic and thus contribute to shaping reality. It is assumed that they act as a fuel for the digital transformation through corresponding policies and strategies (cf., e.g., the Federal Government’s programmatic draft “Shaping Digitalisation – the Federal Government’s implementation strategy”). This also applies to the humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences themselves. That way, Digital Humanities has established itself a separate discipline, whose concepts and procedures differ greatly from traditional perspectives and understandings of texts in the humanities, and which is designed to use the potentials of quantitative text analyses and digital editions not only for the actual research process, but also for the broadly effective staging and marketing of scholarship (Schmale 2015, p. 10): Humanities’, cultural studies’, and social sciences’ diagnoses of the future also shape images of a digital future that initiate and stimulate scholarly practices.

The guiding concept 'Shaping', which also provides the programme’s title, allows us to use a specifically analytical focus on the, in our view, central connection between disparate designs of a digital future on the one hand and the powerful force of these designs on the other. This is because this concept, which refers back to the Gestalt psychology of the early 20th century, draws attention to both the “Gestalt character” of blueprints of the future and their power to shape reality. It emphasises the meaningful condensation of disparate elements (aspects of reality, ideas, time structures, etc.) in a picture, an image, a figure, which suggests itself to be perceived as a whole which is more than the sum of its parts. Hence, “Gestalten” have a special synthesizing and affecting power which determines their formative effect. They are thus more than mere signs or symbols that signify or represent a reality already assumed to exist, but are constitutive of this reality itself (cf., inter alia, Kittsteiner 2005, pp. 25-57; fundamentally Etzemüller 2019).

Against this background, our initial thesis is that, in order to explain and understand the dynamics of the shaping of the future which, in this sense, is mediated by a figure, it is of central importance to examine the emergence and the conditions of emergence, the construction, the media forms, the contents and modes of operation, the persuasive power, and the impact of the “imagined futures” (Beckert 2018) linked to “digitalisation” from a perspective informed by cultural studies. This is necessary particularly because the digital transformation can only be consciously controlled and shaped in a participatory way if its imaginary and thus predominantly unconsciously operating driving forces are also brought into focus (for technical sociology research on acceptance and participation procedures, cf. Häußling 2014, pp. 381-400). The results of the PhD programme’s research should be able to answer technocratic assertions of factual constraints by showing alternatives for action and design. In this way, the PhD programme does not accept the imaginations and rhetoric of competitiveness and (technical) progress, which are currently linked to ‘digitalisation’, as a disposition of its own research, but rather puts these imaginations and rhetoric up for negotiation.

Thus, the reflexive perspective of the PhD programme’s research is neither neutral nor one-sidedly biased, but rather a specifically committed perspective: From a “(more) complex inner position” (Boltanski 2010, p. 149; our translation) ‘on the border’ between research and the researched, the studies, each with their own theoretically informed voices, should contribute to current debates on the possibilities of (co)shaping the digital transformation, taking into account the diverse interests, needs and abilities of people (cf. Aulenbacher et al. 2017; Scheffer/Schmidt 2013; Gans 2010; Burawoy 2005). Overall, the PhD programme thus aims at the empirically based development of a critical theory of digital transformation that is characterised by modesty. It neither celebrates nor demonises it, but is “interested in which digitalisation we (can) want to what extent – and which not” (Hochmann 2018, p. 39; our translation).

Depending on the nature of the PhD project, this reflexive approach also includes the option that, in the research process, the researchers enter into a joint discourse with the actors and interest groups of the respective field, in which questions are formulated and new knowledge is produced, discussed, assessed, evaluated, and disseminated (cf. Alkemeyer/Buschmann/Sulmowski 2019). Interest groups can include user communities of the digital community, representatives of politics and the media, recognised experts or commercial enterprises, and educational institutions, who each develop their own (future) ideas of a digital transformation of society and, on the basis of these ideas, guide and legitimise the shaping of the social present. The aim of this approach is to organise a productive interaction between academic and non-academic forms of knowledge in such a way that alternative possibilities for social dealings with ‘digitalisation’ become visible, enthusiastic as well as defeatist narratives can be assessed, and technicistic reductions of the debate on digitalisation, for example, to discourses and practices of teaching ‘digital competence’ are avoided.

Webmaster (Changed: 15 Nov 2024)  Kurz-URL:Shortlink: https://uol.de/p73878en | # |
Zum Seitananfang scrollen Scroll to the top of the page