Forschung

The DFG-funded research project "Planning-in-Action: The Communicative Fabrication of the Future in Projective Genres" is dedicated to projective genres of everyday communication. Projective genres are understood as solidified forms of communication that are used to talk about the future in everyday life. In projective genres, the future is communicatively processed in the broadest sense. The project is dedicated to the forms of speaking about future actions in everyday contexts, i.e. the communicative forms with which interactors prepare, agree upon, plan their actions in everyday life. Projective genres are to be understood as the totality of forms available to interactors for communicatively manufacturing their futures. The project aims at the empirical analysis of these genres. The research project thus ties in with the genre research of Thomas Luckmann and Jörg Bergmann. On the basis of audio and video recordings, the project examines how actors talk about small and large-scale intended actions and how these communications develop and change over time of the intended action in question. In contrast to previous genre research, a longitudinal research design will be applied that accompanies the observed actors trans-situationally over a longer period of time and can thus show how their action projects gradually develop and unfold, change and take shape in their communications. The usual conversation-analytical method for genre analysis is supplemented accordingly by ethnographic procedures.

In addition, the production and handling of artifacts is included (sketches, notes, calendars, etc.) insofar as they play a role as communicative resources. The project thus investigates the communications associated with 'planning-in-action' and thus aims at a closer linking of genre research with action theory. The project aims at an empirical analysis of projective genres on the basis of selected fields. The focus will be on actors and their everyday communications, who pursue an action project together and process it communicatively. First of all, it wants to describe the whole of projective forms, i.e. the genre family of projective genres, which actors make use of, and show to which genre series projective genres are concatenated in situ and transsituatively. In conversation-analytical sequence analyses, the internal and external structure of the genres is analyzed in detail and it is shown with which means the interactants process their (common) future and negotiate it communicatively. Thus, the project contributes to the analysis of everyday communication; above all, however, it shows how everyday actors produce their future communicatively.