Into the Future with Media Education. Drafts, Approaches, and (inter)disciplinary Exchanges. #mpaed2023

Fall Conference of the Department Media Education of the German Educational Research Association (GERA/DGfE), Thursday, September 21^st and Friday, September 22^nd 2023, at the FernUniversität in Hagen

Claudia de Witt¹ (Lehrgebiet Bildungstheorie und Medienpädagogik)

Sandra Hofhues¹ (Lehrgebiet Mediendidaktik)

¹ Fakultät für Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften der FernUniversität in Hagen

Please submit your abstract until 14 May 2023 at https://www.conftool.com/mpaed2023. Please also find the author guidelines there.
Call for Papers as PDF (German)
Call for Papers as PDF (English)

Conference website: https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/mpaed2023/

If we look ahead, we can see a future, in which our lives will be characterized, stronger than today, by digitalization, technologization, datafication, hybridization and human-machine fusions. And at the same time, we are already and will be confronted by crises, conflicts or possible (cyber) wars. Uncertainties and an accompanying quest for answers will be a key feature of our everyday lives: because of the use of algorithms and subsequent calls for «complexity reduction» and «control»; because of the emergence of data-intensive digital platforms and subsequent demands on Educational Sciences regarding research and governance of big data and analytic tools; because of new epistemic actors such as ChatGPT and other (voice-) bots or because of technologies that make decisions for us, provide recommendations, predict future action, but also evoke opacity.

In light of the seriousness of changes in all areas of life, these concerns are no longer the exclusive focus of Media Education. They are increasingly subject of debate and research in other sub-disciplines of Educational Sciences (and beyond). At the same time, scientific and educational policy initiatives are calling on Media Education to position themselves. Hence, current societal changes – in the wake of altered human-technology relationships – do not only cause more ambiguous positions for humans in medial life worlds and evoke new actants, they do require most of all: sketches, drafts, new and old approaches by Media Education as well as (inter-)disciplinary encounters with media education as a discipline and profession.

It is also one of the reasons why Media Education faces the challenge of explaining (its) future-designs, disclosing its disciplinary justifications, and hence turning its own engagement with digitization and digitality into a subject of consideration. As we can learn from the history of the development of media education, (inter-)disciplinary encounters and reflections have to be part of this: The emergence of scientific Media Education a little more than 50 years ago, the foundation of Media Education as a department of GERA/DGfE 25 years ago, and not least due to a series of committed political actions Media Education as an educational discipline/subfield, has also established itself socially: as is exemplified by «KBOM (No education without media)! – Media Education as a field of action for society as a whole» or the Dagstuhl- and Frankfurt-Triangle, which emerged as a result of the interdisciplinary conference on digital education.

Hence, we would like to address the following questions

• What are the achievements of Media Education as a discipline and profession? (By engaging this question we can also emphasize its disciplinary edge in research and insights vis-à-vis educational science and media/technology)
• What are its (normative) aims and socio-/ontological presuppositions?
• And what are its positions, fields of action, and research areas regarding the future?

The conference motto «With Media Education into the Future» takes up these reflections in a critical-reflexive way. By identifying and examining the historicity of current Media Education, we do have (in terms of stock-taking) a marked interest in jointly using this fall-conference to trace the (historic) development, sketch lines of development, and determine possible guiding ideas as well as positions that media education is built upon since its foundation and that media education wants to advance.

Looking (back) into special issues of Media Education and into the books series «Jahrbuch Medienpädagogik» renders fruitful insights: key terms of Media Education have been discussed here from its start (as in volume 20 of the Zeitschrift MedienPädagogik) as well as methods and methodologies (as in volume 10 of the books series). Jahrbuch Medienpädagogik 6 reflects upon Media Education as a sub-discipline within Educational Sciences and searches for (and defines) its position, determines research areas as well as research methods, and considers lines of a Media Educational Studies in teacher education and training. At the same time, it renders visible inter- and transdisciplinary references and contexts. The richness in approaches and perspectives proves Media Education to be a «vibrant/vivid discipline» (Jahrbuch Medienpädagogik 6, Editorial); and the discipline’s strength is revealed in its openness, receptivity, its critical reflectivity, and its spirit, and intention to participate in shaping society and its future.

We consider these themes and questions addressed in the special issues and in Jahrbuch Medienpädagogik to be more relevant than ever – even if the answers have to be different in the context of digitalization and digitality – since «Media Education inevitably changes its appearance» (ibid.). This raises the following questions:

• What does Media Education represent as a sub-discipline within Educational Sciences and what is at its core as a sub-discipline? How does Media Education address and handle its richness in theoretical and methodical approaches, and in its subject areas? Does Media Education have a conception of itself and if so, can or should it hold on to it?
• What are Media Education’s relationships and what are its references and connections to the other subdisciplines within Educational Sciences? How can we (successfully) pursue or frame interdisciplinarity within the educational disciplines?
• What are (or were) the understandings of «media» within Media Education? What kinds of interdisciplinary references or adoptions does Media Education rely upon or use for its approaches? What kinds of impacts do these interdisciplinary references and adoptions have on how the future is being shaped or imagined with Media Education?
• How do digital technologies and digital media-technologies interrelate, and how does this relation shape the subject areas of Media Education?
• What kind of relevance does Media Educational knowledge or insights have, if technical-medial phenomena change at a higher pace? How well can the discipline capture these changes and how stable is its ontological approach?
• What is the significance of a specific Media Educational approach to these phenomena/changes, given that other disciplines also address them?
• Which strategies and practices can help to prevent a distinction between Media Educational practice and research, and a drift into an either exaggerated conservative pedagogical direction, or unreasonable illusions of freedom? What kinds of options could (or does) Media Education offer regarding these questions?

These questions build upon lively debated topics and hopefully serve as the basis for an exciting conference with keynotes, sessions, discussion-forums as well as thoughts «out of the box».

We are looking forward to:

• contributions that reflect achievements of Media Education since its founding (including contributions that critically reflect upon guiding ideas of current Media Education, and/or explore future themes of Media Education;
• contributions focusing on traditional and recent fields within Media Education, and (Critical) Educational Technology (in informal, non-formal, and formal contexts), as well as contributions on established, and future research perspectives, as well as applied scenarios;
• contributions reflecting the importance of interdisciplinary research and work for the discipline (including contributions that focus either on the increasing expectations regarding interdisciplinarity, or on methods of Media Education research).
• contributions that address the question to which extent there is (or will be, or can be) a «general» Media Education (and what that would entail) and what is possibly not (or beyond) the scope of Media Education.

Conceptual and theoretical contributions as well as empirical work, also from ongoing project contexts, are requested. All authors will be invited to contribute to Jahrbuch Medienpädagogik 21 as a follow-up to the conference.

Interested parties are invited to submit an abstract of about 300 words (not counting references) electronically by 14 May 2023 at: https://www.conftool.com/mpaed2023/

• 14 May 2023 Deadline for abstract submissions (max. 300 words, excl. literature) via the Section’s ConfTool
• 12 June 2023 Release of the reviews on all submissions by the conference committee
• 26 June 2023 Deadline for the submission of revised abstracts (extensions excluded!)
• 14 July 2023 The conference program is accessible online

As part of the conference, the Young Network Media Education organizes a doctoral-students’ forum for scientists in their doctoral phase. Submissions (talks or posters) with or without reference to the conference topic are welcome. Well established scholars from the professional community will participate in the doctoral students’ forum as critical friends: they will provide critical-constructive feedback and advice on projects.

Interested parties are invited to submit their abstracts with up to 500 words (excl. literature) by 14 May 2023. We kindly ask for the submission of a short CV (approx. 500 characters). Please also include the names of current supervisors as well as scholars, who we could invite as critical friends. Please submit your abstract and additional information via https://www.conftool.com/mpaed2023.

For further information (incl. fees, contact-information, hotels etc.) please visit the conference website: https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/mpaed2023/.

We look forward to your submissions!