My name is Benjamin Jörissen, Dr. phil., and I am a research assistant at the Institute for Educational Science at the University of Magdeburg (Germany). My work (postdoctoral lecture qualification) focuses on how the new visual cultures of the internet transform and enhance the way people experience themselves, the world, and others.
My research is based on the assumption that the internet is a space where new, formally unknown kinds of informal educational cultures emerge - such as online-communities, social networks and metaverses (like Second Life). While I recognize that other media, like verbal and auditive articulations, are also of great importance, I believe that the significant changes of visual culture in the new media are bound to play a major role for future modes of gaining identities, experiencing others, and seeing the world.
Due to my former work, I am especially attentive to issues concerning the relations of image, body, self and others/otherness. While my empirical research is mainly ethnographic, based on "Grounded Theory" (as developed by Glaser and Strauss, and recently innovated by Adele E. Clarkes grounded method of "Situational Analysis"), my theory toolbox includes critical theory (esp. Adorno), postmodern thinking (esp. Foucault), anthropology, constructivism (esp. Niklas Luhmann), symbolic interactionism (esp. G. H. Mead, including his late philosophical works), and, of course, cultural studies and visual culture discourses. - Well ... though we are standing on the shoulders of giants, the art is not to fall into the gaps between them. ;-)
Former and further fields of work include identity issues, which engaged me so much I had to write two books about (one as co-author); media issues like media anthropology (my dissertation - similar to PhD Thesis - focuses on the relations of media, image, and reality); film studies; and of course internet studies.
