It has been a little while that I had the pleasure to attend the conference „Education is Relation not Output? – Scenes of Knowledge and Knowledge Acquisition“ (May 17th-19th 2016) at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden.
The talk and workshop that I gave within the panel „Art, Visual Culture and Media” has now been published as a book chapter:
Waltinger, Michael (2017): Media and Cultural Education – A Means to Social Cohesion in a Multicultural (Media) World. In: Rodríguez Sieweke, Lara (ed.): Learning Scenarios for Social and Cultural Change. Bildung through Academic Teaching. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Edition, pp. 171 – 183.
Here is the abstract:
In an increasingly mediatized world (Lundby; Hepp & Krotz), media usage is as much entangled in everyday life as everyday life is mediated (Röser; Paus-Hasebrink). The media are important agents of socialization (Hoffmann & Mikos)and are involved in the social construction of the world, as they carry social meaning and reproduce dominant social norms and ideologies (Devereux). In doing so, the media contribute to audiences forms of knowledge, not only about their immediate social surroundings but also about more distant contexts, places and cultures (ibid.).
As the world also becomes an increasingly globalized place, the flow of media images generally follows this trend. It does so, however, in a quite unequal fashion, creating what might be called a divided global village, whereas uneven flows of media images in their „re-presentation“ (ibid.) often reproduce the inequalities of the social world (Waltinger; Hall, Evans & Nixon). Additionally, both immigration countries where good parts of the population are foreign-born and the current refugee situation testify that it is also the flow of people that tends to become more global, making the world a smaller and denser place.
When globalized media worlds increasingly become intercultural life worlds, media education has to become part of essential education, because it is desirable that people are able to competently navigate through and participate in those media-life-worlds (Süss, Lampert & Wijnen). Cultural education needs to become integral, since the concepts of cultural relativism and cultural sensitivity (Jandt) allow to appreciate different cultures without measuring them against own standards. The university as a place for social development could and should be a forum in which such knowledge is actively formed.