Conference Agenda

Societal transformation processes, as exemplified in recent years by transformations induced by digitality, affect not only the what but increasingly also the how of educational research. Processes of learning, education and socialization today take place under changed conditions: digital platforms, algorithmic systems, LLMs, and other epistemic actors are no longer merely objects of research but act as constitutive forces in the very production of what is addressed as social reality in educational research. Consequently, they call into question the methodological foundations of qualitative research - particularly its social-theoretical premises - or make their expansion necessary.

Although numerous theoretical reference points already exist - such as the concepts of “deep mediatization” (Hepp 2019), the “digital condition” (Stalder 2018), respective the “postdigital condition” (Cramer 2014) - methodological discussions that consider the constitutive power of the digital often remain fragmented. In standard reference works on qualitative research in educational science (see e.g. Kondratjuk et al. 2022; Mertler 2024; Dika et al. 2025), digitality, if mentioned at all, is frequently treated as one topic among many, without recognizing its transversal relevance to all domains of educational research. A methodological reflection on digitality in the sense of theoretically grounded empirical research (Kalthoff et al. 2008), however, has so far been largely absent from the German-speaking discourse in educational science.

Our interdisciplinary symposium therefore understands digitality not as a discrete phenomenon to be examined but as a profound epistemological challenge. If sociality increasingly articulates itself as socio-mediality (Bettinger 2022), and if we take the shift “from media anthropology to anthropomediality” (Othold & Voss 2015) seriously, then classical methodological premises begin to shift. Educational media research - conceived as a transversal field within educational science - can provide impulses for a methodological reflection and renewal that not only considers digital mediality as an empirical field but acknowledges it as a constitutive element of pedagogical realities.

The three contributions of the symposium address this constellation from different perspectives and introduce interdisciplinary impulses, for instance by engaging with media studies approaches and international discussions on postdigitality in qualitative research (e.g. Murris 2021; 2022). The contributions explore methodological challenges involved in researching a field characterized by digitality-induced (dis)ruptions and high dynamics. Focusing on phenomena such as the excessiveness of digital media practices, subjectivation in the context of digital mood-tracking and generative AI as an educational medium, the papers propose new methodological approaches for discussion.

The symposium thus takes up the ongoing debate on postdigital research perspectives and seeks to stimulate methodological reflections on qualitative research in educational science under the conditions of digital reality. It advocates for a productive opening by deliberately unsettling established methodological routines in the face of the digital - as a constitutive element of pedagogical contemporaneity.

The perspectives offered in the presentations will subsequently be discussed collectively. At the center of this discussion lies the overarching question of whether digitality-driven changes necessitate new methods or methodological adaptations, or whether they merely entail a shift in thematic focus within existing methodological frameworks. The participants will exchange perspectives on a) which phenomena of digitality are specifically relevant for educational and media research, b) what kind of research questions should be raised in contemporary entanglements of digitality, media culture and education, c) which theoretical perspectives help to conceptualize those phenomena, d) what kind of material and research data is at hand, and most importantly e) which methodological approaches can be used, adapted, modified or originally be developed against this backdrop?

The phenomenon of excessive media practices among young people raises many pedagogical questions - but yet, it is primarily researched from the perspective of addiction medicine. This is also reflected in terms such as internet gaming disorder or social media addiction. International studies in this field mostly focus on quantitative research of correlations between personality traits, mental disorders and pathological media use. The current state of research therefore tends to be individual-centred, while socio-mediality (Bettinger 2022) is usually not given consideration. This hardly reflects the conditions of postdigital realities. Based on this criticism, some argue in favour of more relational approaches, such as ‘co-addictive human-machine-configurations’ (e.g. Helm & Matzner 2024). One way of capturing the socio-medial constellations of excessive digital practices - that are deeply inscribed in everyday social practices - is the method of app-based diary surveys. They offer the potential to collect data on routine media use in actu, which is difficult for people to explain verbally in other qualitative surveys (Lev-On & Lowenstein-Barkai 2019). In this paper, we present and methodologically reflect on the method in a current research project. 27 people between the ages of 19 and 22 who, according to their own information, experience or had experienced excessive media use, documented their everyday lives for seven days using an app on their smartphones. They were asked various questions and had the opportunity to respond using text, emojis, audio, images or video. This approach takes account of the multimodality that is part of the cultural space in postdigital societies. A few days after the diary was completed, a biographical interview took place, during which references were made to the participants' entries. Methodologically, the qualitative approaches in the project are located in praxeological sociology of knowledge (Bohnsack 2014) and use the documentary method for the verbal, written data as well as for the visual data. The documentary method asks about the how. Actions are not understood as intentional acts, but as components of overarching contexts of meaning in social practices that can be localised in cultural and life forms. The aim of the contribution is to reflect on the potential of reconstructive analyses of app-based diary data and to address challenges in the various phases of the research process: 1) conceptualization and programming, 2) data collection, 3) analysis and 4) triangulation with other research data in the project.

Bettinger, P. (2022). Digital Materiality and Subjectivation: Methodological Aspects of Hybrid Entanglements in Processes of Bildung. In Patrick Bettinger (Ed.), Educational Perspectives on Mediality and Subjectivation. Cham: Palgrave Pivot. pp. 109–131. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84343-4_6. Bohnsack, R. (2014). Documentary Method. In Uwe Flick (Ed.)The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis, pp. 217-233. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446282243 Helm, P. and Matzner, T. (2024). Co-addictive human–machine configurations: Relating critical design and algorithm studies to medical-psychiatric research on “problematic Internet use”. New Media & Society, 26(12), 7295–7313. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231165916 Lev-On, A., & Lowenstein-Barkai, H. (2019). Viewing diaries in an age of new media: An exploratory analysis of mobile phone app diaries versus paper diaries. Methodological Innovations 12 (1), https://doi.org/10.1177/2059799119844442

The rapid proliferation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in educational contexts presents a fundamental challenge to qualitative inquiry. As algorithmic systems and Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly permeate social practices, they shift from being mere objects of study or neutral instruments to active participants within the research process itself. This paper argues that treating these entities through the binary lens of "digital vs. non-digital methods" is analytically insufficient in the post-digital condition. Instead, we propose a "Post-Digital Methodology" that re-grounds digital inquiry in the established principles of qualitative research to grapple with AI as a constitutive force of reality. Drawing on the sociology of knowledge and Actor-Network Theory, we introduce the concept of the "non-human informant". This concept allows researchers to operationalize the principle of methodological symmetry: We must ask the same critical questions of algorithmic outputs - regarding their situatedness, biases, and "hallucinations" - that we traditionally ask of unreliable human narrators. The opacity of deep learning systems (the "black box") is thus not treated as a technical hindrance requiring computer science solutions, but as a hermeneutic challenge. Qualitative inquiry, with its long tradition of interpreting opaque, contradictory, and messy human data, is uniquely equipped to handle this. The paper outlines how core qualitative strategies can be transformed for this purpose: 1. Media-Theoretical Empiricism (Adequacy): Moving beyond "following the medium" (Rogers) to a "media-theoretical sampling" where the selection of AI tools or data sources (e.g., specific LLMs or archived web data) is treated with the same theoretical rigor as sampling human participants. 2. Interpretation of Opacity: Treating algorithmic outputs as "statements" by non-human informants that require critical triangulation - or rather, crystallization—with heterogeneous data sources (documents, observations, human interviews). By reclaiming qualitative methodologies for the post-digital age, we demonstrate that the "new" challenges of AI do not render traditional methods obsolete. On the contrary, the post-digital condition demands a return to the "social life of methods" to hold these new, eloquent non-human informants accountable within educational research.

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As a sub-phenomenon of the so-called Quantified-Self movement, the practice of tracking moods and feelings via digital apps is gaining momentum. Self-tracking practices are by specific forms of addressing subjects and normativity and are thus characterized by power structures that unfold in the socio-media interaction between bodies and digital artifacts. Drawing on a study conducted in 2024 at the University of Magdeburg (Germany) which looked into usage practices and subjectivation associated with the mood-tracking app Daylio from a praxeological-discursive perspective (Brown & Bettinger 2026), we propose extending analytical efforts to the digital app itself. Our assumption is that apps as designed digital artefacts which manifest societal values, norms and ideals (Klinge & Tost 2024) must be taken into consideration in addition to the usage practices. Through the usage practices they afford, digital artefacts provide offers for subjectivation. In our case, we wanted to gain a deeper understanding of subjectivation processes associated with mood-tracking by analyzing not only how study participants verbalize their practices retrospectively in a group discussion, but also how these media practices of app use relate to the subjectivation offers manifested in the app design. For this reason we propose the analysis of conventions and affordances as part of the design of the app. At the center of our consideration is the concept of relational affordances, defined as specific characteristics of digital artefacts which enable/ invite or impede certain patterns of interaction from users (Bareither 2020). These affordances relate to specific practices which in turn depend on certain knowledge reservoirs of users and are realized in the aspects of the functional design of digital artefacts (Costa 2018; Krämer 2025). Drawing on this theoretical framing, the contribution will discuss methodological aspects of analysing processes of subjectivation as an interplay between media-based affordances and discursive practices. Here, the analysis of discursive practices (Wrana 2015) with regard to modes and offers of subjectivation is expanded to include an affordance-focused and praxeologically grounded analysis of digital artifacts (Bareither 2024).

Bareither, C. (2020). Affordanz. In T. Heimerdinger, & M. Tauschek (Eds.). Kulturtheoretisch Argumentieren. Ein Arbeitsbuch, pp. 32–55. Münster; New York: Waxmann. Bareither, C. (2024). Ethnografische Affordanzanalyse. In: S. Stollfuß, S., Niebling, L., Raczkowski (Eds.). Handbuch Digitale Medien und Methoden. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-36629-2_38-1 Brown, A.-L., & Bettinger, P. (2026). Researching the Discursive in Mood Tracking Practices. Empirical Insights and Methodological Reflections in the Context of a "Smart Journaling"-Study. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 27(1). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-27.1.4417 Costa, E. (2018). Affordances-in-practice: An ethnographic critique of social media logic and context collapse. New Media & Society 22(1): 1–16. Klinge, D., & Tost, J. (2024). Design als Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft der Medienpädagogik: In digitale Technologien eingeschriebene Zeitgeister, Affordanzen und pädagogische Imaginationen. MedienPädagogik: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Medienbildung, S. 71–100. https://doi.org/10.21240/mpaed/jb21/2024.09.04.X. Krämer, F. (2025). Self-Tracking mit digitalen Artefakten: Zur pädagogischen Logik einer distribuierten soziotechnischen Praxis. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-48615-0. Wrana, D. (2015). Zur Methodik einer Analyse diskursiver Praktiken. In F. Schäfer, A. Daniel, & F. Hillebrandt (Eds.). Methoden einer Soziologie der Praxis. Bielefeld: transcript. pp. 121–143.