Epistemologies of Diversity. On Constructing and Managing Difference in Civic Education Textbooks


The PhD project examines the ways in which Civic Education textbooks in Germany have thematised migration and integration in the period from around 1990 to the present and what knowledge about difference is constructed in the process. The starting point is the observation that a tension can be observed between the reproduction of orders of difference in textbooks, on the one hand, and an anchoring of diversity programmes in educational policy, on the other, which increasingly problematise traditional notions of difference and normality. The PhD project examines the treatment of this field of tension in Civic Education textbooks over time with a framework based on sociology of knowledge, discourse-theory and intersectional perspectives. Methodologically, the project is oriented towards a discourse-analytical approach, but also undertakes a dispositive-analytical extension in order to relate the knowledge of difference translated in textbooks to the larger institutional context of the "pedagogic device" (Bernstein). The PhD project aims to contribute to empirically reconstructing the stability and change of notions of both difference and normality and their respective effects.