Conference Agenda

In this symposium, diverse approaches to place-responsive pedagogy are developed. The overall hypothesis is that ‘landscapes’ (1), ‘soundscapes’ (2) and ‘hyperreality’ (3) are concepts of esthetic education. (1) Landscape traces back to the Dutch word ‘landschap’, describing paintings in which the land itself is made the subject of paintings (National Geographic Society, online). Otto Schluter was the first to define geography as landscape science (see Dickinson 1969). There are natural and cultural landscapes. The first of which consists of landforms such as plains, mountains, lakes and natural vegetation. Cultural landscapes are structures of social, civilizational and economic significance that are made up by people. (2) A soundscape (Southworth 1969, Schafer 1977) is an acoustic environment, in which the perceiver is involved. (3) According to Jean Baudrillard ([1981] 1994), hyperreality is a technological context, in which imaginaries make us believe that they are real.

An indispensable aspect of citizenship education is the individual’s (physical) integrity and maximum possible freedom to act. How can personal freedom be protected and effectively supported, not only in reality but also in hyperreality? Democracy, or in pedagogical contexts citizenship education, is usually connected to ‘free speech’, or to giving power to citizenry to voice dissent against despotic rulers Diana C. Mutz (2006) and others describe ‘echo chambers’ in social media. Meant are enclosed spaces, in which a majority of people tends to surround themselves with like-minded people by reinforcing each other in their own position. Then, a blurring of the difference of reality and its simulation takes place. Jean Baudrillard (1994) explains such blurring as ‘hyperreality’ that makes the ethical dimension of free speech, namely to respect another person’s freedom, barely perceivable. How can personal freedom be protected and effectively supported in a hyperreal context? By interpreting an online-game as ‘soundscape’ (Southworth 1969, Schafer 1977) in this presentation ‘place-responsive practice’ (Cameron 2003 and Waldenfels 1994) will be investigated in ‘hyperreal contexts.’

Baudrillard, Jean ([1981] 1994): Simulacra & Simulation. The Precession of Simulacra. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Cameron, J. (2003): Responding to place in a post-colonial era: An Australian perspective. Decolonizing nature: Strategies for conservation in a post-colonial era. New York, NY: Earthscan Publications, p. 172-176. Mutz, Diana C. (2006): Hearing the Other Side. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Southworth, Michael (1969): The Sonic Environment of Cities. In: Environment and Behavior, 1/1, p.49-70. Schafer, R. Murray (1977): The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. New York: Knopf. Waldenfels, B. (1994): Antwortregister. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.

In my contribution, I will zoom in to a part of my doctoral thesis from 2021 where I relate boys’ war play to Erin Manning´s philosophy of movement. Manning (2021) states that individuals not only experience the world through perception, but by perceiving the world it is drawn into human experience. Rather than as something stable with an inner and outer zone, she describes perception as a field of relationships in a world full of dynamic processes where “forces take form”. The virtual momentum in the formation of a movement, arises already before we begin to move. A body perceives through a change in the environment that evokes sensual events. An inner movement becomes an outer movement in a folding, bridging between them. This intensive interplay between world and body never stops and there is no beginning or end to movement. Instead of a body/world idea, she describes movement as one with the world – as a body-world.

Manning, E. (2012). Relationscapes: movement, art, philosophy. MIT press. Theorell, E. (2021). Force, form, transformations: on kinesthetic musicality and body worlding in boy´s war play. Doctoral thesis, University of Stockholm.

In Sweden, as in many other countries in the world, there has been a massive shift in (higher) education towards distance education and online teaching. In the midst of this, some universities introduce and use telepresence robots. A telepresence robot provides a virtual presence – or a bodiless presence – to, for example, a remote student who cannot physically attend the classroom. The overall aim of this paper is to explore dimensions of corporeality and hyperreality in digitalized education. More specifically, the focus will be on the research question - how can embodiment and presence be understood when the students are situated, and their participation are mediated, through telepresence robots? The philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (see e.g. 1968, 1996) and Martin Heidegger (see e.g. 2001) will be used to analyze the complexity of corporeality and hyperreality in digitalized education. Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the lived body supports the analysis of the bodily presence in the room, whereas the Heideggerian ideas and concepts provide entries for an ontological understanding of the relational and spatio-temporal aspects of ‘Being-one’s-Self’ and what ‘Being-there’-with as well as the ‘Being-there’-with-of-Others might mean to students in digitized education.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968): The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1996): Phenomenology of Perception. Motilal Banarsidass Publisher. Heidegger, M. (2001): Heidegger Studies. Duncker & Humblot GmbH.

This symposium paper had to be withdrawn.

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