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Crises and Transformations

Crises are not a new phenomenon for educational science. At present, however, with crises such as climate change, the banking crisis, refugee movements, the Corona pandemic, the energy crisis or the wars in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world, the disruptive, the simultaneous and also the threatening are coming particularly into view. The future of the individual, of society and of the planet appears less as a promising, open space of possibility than as limited, threatening and finite. At the same time, crisis diagnoses as well as proposals for dealing with crises call for far-reaching transformation processes, such as a way of thinking and acting that does justice to the climate crisis and that can be brought about through education.

The concept of crisis is used to describe a turning point within a dramatising development, which is associated with the need to quickly make fundamental decisions as well as to stimulate and/or demand changed action. The transformative power of crises is considered ambivalent, since on the one hand it describes a regaining of stability after a state of emergency, but on the other hand it conceives the crisis-like as an opportunity for the development of something new and thus as the basis of dynamic societies. According to both understandings, crises offer both the potential to make routines reflexive and thus give rise to irritations of (collective) ways of perceiving, thinking and acting, and to be the starting point of a constantly dramatising progression curve, the attempts to deal with which fail and at the end of which there is a possible failure.

Insofar as educational science itself focuses on changeability and development, crises are regarded in its disciplinary theories as productive moments in educational and upbringing processes that can be accompanied and framed pedagogically. In policy processes related to education, the continuous use of the narrative of crisis serves to design a pedagogical treatment of the future. However, against the background of current, collectively shared experiences of crisis and calls for change, it is becoming increasingly questionable that crises in this sense help to create the path to the better. In the face of the climate crisis, for example, there are calls for ‘business as usual’ not to be sufficient, but for finding new ways of becoming together, of caring and of living together for current and future generations on a planet increasingly shaped by human activity.

Making crises and transformations the theme of the GERA Congress 2024 at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg does not, however, mean simply adopting the dramatisation of contemporary diagnoses. The problematisation and reflection of crises have already been highlighted many times by the social and cultural sciences in general as well as by educational science and its sub-disciplinary discourses in particular. With the GERA Congress 2024, we want to take up these reflexive debates, bundle them and continue them. Within the framework of the congress, on the one hand, ways of perceiving and dealing with societal-social, institutional-organisational as well as interactive-individual crises and transformations as topics of educational science and, on the other hand, crises and transformations of educational science itself will be examined. Terms such as postmodern, -socialist, -digital, -colonial, -fossil or the Anthropocene are offers of interpretation that make processes comprehensible, but also narrow them down to certain perspectives. The aim is to take a reflexive look at how diagnoses of crises and programmes for dealing with them are used in everyday and academic knowledge and translated into it, what interpretations and narratives this goes hand in hand with and what discontinuities, breaks and transitions can be observed, as well as what methodological-methodological challenges are associated with this.

In this context of references to local and global, current and historical dimensions, the region of the conference venue Halle can also be understood as a burning glass; the transformations from a socialist to a capitalist social order as well as the current crises and challenges to transform the former chemical industry and lignite region into a place of innovation for a post-fossil future can only be understood as a complex context of local and global contexts.

Formats at the Congress in Halle

Within the framework of the 29th Congress of the GERA, various formats for exchange, controversy and information are planned in order to be able to present and work on the congress theme and other currently relevant topics in educational science.

A focussed thematic reference to the congress topic is the characteristic of the symposia. Working groups, research and theme forums and poster contributions, on the other hand, can be designed more freely in their choice of theme. Ad-hoc groups, in which current disciplinary and scientific policy issues and topics are dealt with, are another component of the programme.