The project group uses cultural and historical studies approaches to examine the digitisation of society and the far-reaching social, political, economic and cultural ramifications. It asks which hierarchies and dividing lines have resulted from this process of digital change and which social inequalities and power imbalances have been reproduced or exacerbated. The individual projects explore, from a historical perspective, how the, in part latent, biases endemic to technological systems have impacted the world of work, gender relations, the education system and migratory patterns.
The GEI sub-project ‘New digital technologies in the context of schools and society’ explores the political and pedagogical discourse surrounding the introduction and impact of new digital technologies, including teaching practices, in German schools between the 1960s and 1990s.
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Methodology
In terms of methodology the research group will analyse digital inequality from a diachronic perspective and will develop transnational historical approaches through their interdisciplinary research structure. Focussing on Germany (including the complex internal relationship between the FRD and the GDR) in its transnational contexts the group will study the largely unresearched history of digital inequalities by comparing the German case with international developments, particularly in the Anglophone world. An analysis of mutual perceptions and interactions, transfers and interrelations will also be undertaken. The empirical research will occasionally explore as far back as the formative years of the 1950s, but the period since the 1970s will be the key focus of the project, as that is the period associated with miniaturisation and the development of microcomputers. It is also a period characterised by the emergence of software companies and a rapidly expanding social diffusion of digital hardware and knowledge, developments that can certainly be described as the core of an accelerated digital shift. The group’s projects extend into the early twenty-first century but there is a particular focus on the transitional period of the crises of the 1970s, as well as the end of the Cold War and German reunification in the 1990s.
