Keywords
civic education
qualitative interviews
adolescent
antifeminism
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Copyright (c) 2026 Josephine B. Schmitt, Kramer Michaela, Franziska Bellinger, Marit Spies, Samuel T. Simon
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Transdisciplinary research has been established as a distinct research approach in recent decades. It aims to address challenges that are relevant to practice, context-specific, and require transformation. Particularly in the context of political media education, the question arises of how scientific, practical, and local knowledge can be integrated when digital public spheres are characterized by high dynamism, affective forms of communication, and platform-specific logics. This article focuses on the Volkswagen Foundation-funded project ULAT (2024 – 2025). This project analyzed anti-feminisms on TikTok and developed educational offerings and materials for various educational contexts. The central question is: Under what conditions does the integration of different forms of knowledge succeed in such a transdisciplinary, transformation-oriented (media) education project, and how can tensions between scientific and practical logics in this field be productively addressed? These questions are answered based on guided interviews with project participants, which were conducted as a part of the research-based support for the project. The article illustrates how transdisciplinary knowledge integration can be structured within the tension between educational research and practice, and what conditions enable its success in the context of a project on political education in the digital sphere.
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