Political Literacy in the Migration Society (PLiM). An ethnographic study of political practice in schools (8th grade) in the cities of Berlin, Vienna and Zurich

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Paul Mecheril
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 324314813

The research project Political Literacy in the Migration Society (PLiM) will investigate the forms and types of political articulation of students in the eighth grade at selected schools in the cities of Berlin, Vienna, and Zurich. Phenomena of transnational migration are most influential for societal urban life. Thus, being educated with regard to issues of the (world) migration society is a fundamental political demand of our times. PLiM analyses and explicates political literacy by collecting and combining three types of data: spontaneous interactive practices in the school context; relevant discourse fragments concerning the migration society in each global city; utterances from stimulus-based group conversations with students.PLiM is designed to analyse the political articulations of students so that forms of political literacy with regard to the conditions of the migration society, their interactive (enabling) conditions, and their effects will become empirically and theoretically evident. Literacy thereby is understood as the context specific handling of linguistically formulated questions and representations of social reality. Against this background, political literacy constitutes the practice of context-relational political articulation, and means reading social reality and referring to it in a meaningful and appropriate way. Thereby it is characterised by knowledge of political issues, a degree of experiential self-reflection relating to this knowledge, as well as arguing appropriate political standpoints. Key research questions are:Which different forms of political articulation do exist in schools in migration society, and which conditions do form the basis of such articulations? Which circumstances do facilitate the development of positive forms of political literacy in the migration society?In order to explore the specific contextual conditions for political education processes without reproducing neither micro-contextualism nor methodological nationalism this study compares and contrasts 12 schools from three global cities (Berlin, Vienna, and Zurich). By means of the complementary comparison of schools in the three cities, as well as the integration of praxeological and discourse-analytical research strategies, the study will make it possible to draw theoretical general and empiric specific conclusions concerning the relationship between the possibility of political literacy and context conditions.In order to examine PL as a context-relational practice in the context of its origin this study will combine mainly the methods of audio-supported participatory observations, ethnographic interviews, discourse analysis, and stimulus-based group conversations.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria, Switzerland
• Partner Organisation: Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF); Schweizerischer Nationalfonds (SNF)
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Roland Reichenbach; Professor Dr. Erol Yildiz