Ever since the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, schools in several countries worldwide are trying to become more inclusive so that children with disabilities can participate equally in public education and learn together in the so called school for all (Preuss-Lausitz 1988).
Depending on the individual school’s culture, schools react to this educational policy and social mandate in different ways. For example, structural changes are made to the school’s architecture or a subpage with content about 'inclusion' is created on the school’s website. Through these and other actions, schools actively create 'inclusion' in processes of school development planning. The Website is an increasingly important medium in school development planning processes. Similar to corporate media communication practices, the school’s media presence in the World Wide Web becomes an essential element of its organizational identity. The 'autonomous' school (see Salokangas/Ainscow 2018) has to distinguish itself as an attractive, outcome oriented learning environment under the constraints of an increasingly market oriented educational landscape (see Höhne 2015). As transdisciplinary research approaches in the fields of disability studies, educational research, culture, design and media studies pointed out, images “as part of a diverse discursive and media network” (Ochsner/Grebe 2013: 8) not only contribute to the (in)visibility of disability but also to the production of knowledge-power of disability and inclusion.

From a discourse theoretical perspective following Foucault and Laclau/Mouffe, my study reconstructs how general German schools with an explicitly inclusive profile are presenting 'inclusion' on their own websites. The empirical part focusses on the materialized media practices (school websites) as discursive constructions of ‚inclusion‘ and analyzes the ways in which these practices create a specific aesthetic of inclusion that differs from other types of media, like for example print media. The project’s main interest is to give answers to the questions of whether and how websites of schools with an inclusive profile contribute in the process of shaping power/knowledge regarding the human, inclusive education and subjectivation and furthermore what’s the role of digital media in this.

While recent research primarily investigates whether and how institutional or informal learning is transformed with and via digital media or in the context of a changed mediality, whereas studies from the areas of educational media research (Aktaş 2020, Jörissen et al. 2019) as well as those of media related pedagogical anthropology (Wulf 2014, 2018) focus on how a digital mediality shapes the way we perceive humans at all. Noticeable is that the corresponding work including disability and visual culture studies often do not refer to each other. Accordingly we often deal with a lack of valuable scientific knowledge of transdisciplinary phenomena. The development of a transdisciplinary perspective as part of the planned project is intended to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of such phenomena.

My Pre-Conference Resource can be found on my academia account via this link: https://www.academia.edu/50296915/Aesthetics_of_Inclusion_An_Empirical_Approach_to_School_Websites?source=swp_share

The empirical research will be systematically pursued in a multi-stage process: In order to capture the specifics of digital media with the previously developed analysis method, I am planning a cross-media comparative analysis of print and online media of 16 German schools that take part in the study (a). In addition (b), comparisons are made with school websites of Danish schools since Denmark established inclusive education for all pupils many years ago (international comparative perspective).

On ECER 2021 I want to present the design of the study and discuss how it might be possible not to reproduce established social categories of difference such as sex/gender, class, race, dis/ability while simultaneously trying to find out if and how materialized media practices re-/construct these differences.

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