Dialogischer Pluralismus als Polit-Talk – Ein Seminarkonzept zur Vermittlung von Diskurskultur und angewandter Pluraler Ökonomik

Manipulation liegt vor, wenn Beeinflussung verdeckt, zielgerichtet und absichtsvoll erfolgt. Wendet man Kenntnisse der Kognitionswissenschaften und der Beeinflussungsforschung auf ökonomische Standardlehrbücher an, wird deutlich, wie sehr diese Bücher die Schwächen der Studierenden im Hinblick auf ihre Fähigkeit zur kritischen Reflexion ausnutzen.

Founded in 1968, The Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) is an interdisciplinary membership organization of academics and of activists. Its mission is to promote the study, development and application of radical political economic analysis to social problems. Concretely, this involves a continuing critique of both the capitalist system, and of all forms of exploitation and oppression. URPE’s mission also includes, coming out of this critique, helping to construct a progressive social policy, and a human-centered radical alternative to capitalism.

Die übergeordnete Forschungsfrage des Projektsseminars lautet: „Können Low-Profit-Investitionen einen zusätzlichen Beitrag zur Umsetzung der SDG leisten?“

By conducting a discourse analysis (SKAD) in the field of academic economics textbooks, this paper aims at reconstructing frames and identity options offered to undergraduate students relating to the questions ‘Why study economics?’ and ‘Who do I become by studying economics?’. The analysis showed three major frames and respective identity offerings, all of which are contextualized theoretically, with prominent reference to the Foucauldian reflection of the science of Political Economy. Surprisingly, none of them encourages the student to think critically, as could have been expected in a pedagogical context. Taken together, economics textbooks appear as a “total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible action” (Foucault), therefore, as a genuine example of Foucauldian power structures.