Individual Freedom and Social Norm - Sustainability and Responsibility Discourses on Environment and Education since 1990 (Individual and Society)

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The subproject is intended to contribute to the substantive goal of the research group "Controversial Concepts" to write a narrative discourse history of Germany since 1990 by looking first at German environmental discourse (first funding phase) and then at German educational discourse (second funding phase). The initial hypothesis of the subproject to be tested is that environmental and educational discourse are particularly shaped by the question of individual vs. societal responsibility in relation to everyday decision-making and action: Environment and education affect every individual erveryday and at the same time are to be shaped in a sustainable way, including through responsible consumer action, for a future that is not directly observable. In this context, from the point of view of the individual, the space for self-determination and self-efficacy is, at least perceived, to be restricted, while from the point of view of society, it is precisely this restriction that is understood as an individual contribution to responsible and sustainable development.For the sake of a clearer focus, the two discourses will therefore be understood as partly interrelated strands of the discourse on sustainable development, which is chronologically framed by Agenda 21 of 1992 and Agenda 2030 of 2015. Topic strands to be investigated will therefore equally refer to resource consumption and resource protection and corresponding attributions of responsibility. In order to identify commonalities, differences, and entanglements between the two fields of discourse with regard to the cultural governance of individual decisions for sustainable action, the project focuses on the question of images of nature, environmental practices, and related consumer stereotypes.As in all of the research group's subprojects, the project will work with the research group's diachronic core corpus (Bundestag protocols and various leading media since 1990). For the first funding phase with the focus on environmental discourse, the position papers of the BUND/Bund für Umwelt- und Naturschutz will be used as a supplement in order to be able to consider early topics from an environmental protection perspective. A complementary case study on product packaging will show how the central topics of the German environmental discourse are currently reflected in consumer communication. The methodological goal of the research group, to bring together discourse linguistic categories and digital annotation in a collaborative way, to expand them systematically, and to evaluate them with regard to the transparency and intersubjectivity of hermeneutic interpretation processes, will be achieved in the project by analyzing, among other things, controversial buzzwords and keywords, attributions of roles and responsibilities, images of nature used for argumentative purposes, and the evaluation of environmental practices.