Dr. Paul Reszke

Paul Reszke studied German language and literature, philosophy and psychology in Kassel and completed his master's degree in 2009 with a literary science thesis on "Narrative Strategies and Theories of Memory in W. G. Sebald's 'Austerlitz'". The doctoral thesis was done as a teacher for special tasks in the field of linguistics/language history under the supervision of Andreas Gardt on the topic "Knowledge Dynamics in the Media Society  - The Discourse on School Amok Runs". In it, the press-media debate about a widely discussed phenomenon is examined on the basis of a concrete communicative event field between 1999 and 2010 in order to work out how language becomes knowledge and ultimately social action. Through the chosen period of investigation, the beginnings of online journalism are simultaneously negotiated.

Based on the dissertation, broader thematic fields of contemporary communication and the exchange of knowledge also come into view collaboratively, for example, with the philosopher and science theorist Martin Böhnert, the pattern of thought and argumentation behind the use of the word "plausible" (and related terms); the knowledge (always co-)negotiated in pop culture (for example, about gender concepts); or with a transdisciplinary research group on climate change from a humanities and cultural studies perspective.

Since 2016, he has been working on the intersection of language and knowledge in the context of art exhibitions, especially documenta. Currently, under the supervision of Liliana Gómez and Andreas Gardt, the pilot project "Knowledge through communication routines - analyses using the example of documenta 15" is underway, in which more than 100 people provided narrative information in interviews in English and German about knowledge they brought and took with them to documenta fifteen. The collected data will be processed and analyzed interactionally, i.e. with a special methodological focus on the complexity of oral communication. Based on this project, a broader investigation with an analogous orientation is currently being prepared for documenta 16 (2027). The differentiated perception of art by a global and diverse audience can - so the assumption - be made tangible above all on the basis of multimodal (for instance mimic, gestural, context-bound) face-to-face interaction and made fruitful for further and more differentiated research at the interface of art and society.

Currently, an essay is being written with Tamara Bodden on the linguistic negotiation of trust between politics, economics, and art using the example of documenta exhibitions 14 and 15 (to be published in early 2024). Here we see the extent to which the linguistic view of trust communication at the interface of different social functional areas opens up insights into dialogue (im)possibilities in the present.

With Valentina Roether and Felix Böhm, a special issue of the linguistic journal Aptum on the topic of "#climate" is being produced. In it, first, the current state of linguistic research on communication on social media will be documented and expanded. Secondly, the digital space, into which central social debates, e.g. on the environment and sustainability, are increasingly moving, is to be measured in its complexity as well as its positive and negative potentiality (to be published in mid-2024).