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Performative Imagined Futures
Swiss Vocational Education and Training in the long 1970s
The dissertation project takes up the concept of "future" as a category of historical analysis. Specifically, it examines imagined futures of and through Vocational Education and Training (VET) in the long “crisis-ridden” 1970s. VET takes center stage when social and political visions of the future are discussed - not only because it is perceived as a "public good". The vast majority of young people in Switzerland choose this educational path after secondary school. VET is also seen as a "critical success factor" for the nation state, as it forms the political intersection for maintaining economic competitiveness, social integration, and individual development. Accordingly, it represents an intersection of divergent economic, social, and educational policy visions of the future that are struggling for validity. The project focusses on the political and public-deliberative debates as well as on the discussions surrounding the contemporary youth and apprenticeship movements. The aim is to answer the question of how individual and collective actors in the field of VET imagined, communicated, and negotiated the future and which visions of the future were actually realized as performative offers for action, and which were not. In doing so, no "history of victory" committed to successful decisions will be written, since the historical dynamics of (competing) visions of the future can be captured more adequately in this way. Expressed visions of the future are understood linguistically as performative actions that claim validity and thus attempt to shape the future. The conceptions of the future are analyzed using source criticism, reconstructed contextually, and located in an international context. Specifically, the project ties in with current work at the interface between historical futurology and historical educational research.
| 2017-2021 | Master's programme in general and historical educational science Master’s thesis with the title “The Curricular Construction of an National Identity in the Service of Saving the World: A Reconstruction of the Discursively Constructed Swiss Identity within Education for Sustainable Development” |
University of Zurich |
| 2003-2006 |
Bachelor’s programme, teaching diploma for primary level |
Zurich University of Teacher Education |
| Since 2022 | Teaching and research assistant at the chair of Vocational Education and Training and Adult Education (BWB) at the Institute of Education (IfE), University of Zurich |
| 2021 | Student assistant at the BWB chair at the IfE, University of Zurich |
| 2019-2021 |
Student employee at the Offices for Research Methods at the IfE in the project “Digital Edition of the Copy Books from Pestalozzi’s Institute in Yverdon”, University of Zurich |
| 2018 | Student assistant at the Offices for Research Methods at the IfE for the seminar “Historical and Text-Analytical Methods”, University of Zurich |
| 2014, 2016 |
External instructor in the mathematics department, Zurich University of Teacher Education |
| 2006-2014 | Primary school teacher, middle school level, as well as practical instructor |
ZORA Publication List (link only in German)
