Anniversary special issue marking our fifth anniversary
Half a decade of AS*EER –
Looking back and ahead for the development of socioeconomic education and science
Driven by the idea of discussing questions and issues of economic nature in the broader context of the social sciences from a scientific and didactic perspective, on October 6, 2016, more than two dozen university lecturers founded the Association for Socioeconomic Education and Research (AS*EER). The driving force that motivated the founders to come together at Goethe University Frankfurt was their shared understanding that education in matters of the economic, the political and the social is in its nature dependent on insights from all related scientific fields: economics, political science and sociology as well as on the consideration of historical, legal, psychological, geographical and educational disciplines. Instead of narrowing down teaching and research to individual positions, the AS*EER has since been committed to interdisciplinary, multi-paradigmatic and method(olog)ically diverse perspectives of socio-economic education and science in this sense.
Five years later, after the founding declaration was signed in Frankfurt am Main, more than 170 academics from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Great Britain, South Korea, Japan and the USA are involved in the AS*EER. In particular, the conferences that have so far taken us to the Akademie für politische Bildung in Tutzing, the University of Duisburg-Essen, the Pädagogische Hochschule Wien and virtually to the Goethe University Frankfurt pave the way for the personal and ideational networks of teachers and researchers in the field of socioeconomics. In addition to the annual conferences, the publication series Sozioökonomische Bildung und Wissenschaft (Socioeconomic Education and Science), which is published in cooperation with Springer VS, has made a significant contribution since the beginning of the AS*EER’s history by presenting articles that deal in particular with political science, sociology, business education and economics from an interdisciplinary, pluralistic and reflexive perspective, taking into account approaches to higher education and subject didactics as well as fulfilling the scientific standard of the double-blind peer review process. The establishment of the university teaching section and the third awarding of the AS*EER prize for outstanding theses sponsored by the Canopus Foundation in 2021 also speak to the growing life and increasing breadth of activities as an academic society. The anniversary and the associated anniversary publication allow us to take stock and look ahead to the next steps on the AS*EER’s agenda. With this anniversary publication, we invite you to reflect on the first five years of the AS*EER with us and to get to know the AS*EER and its fields of work better. We hope to arouse interest in becoming actively involved in future projects for the further development of socio-economic education and science.
Tim Engartner, Silja Graupe, Udo Hagedorn, Harald Hantke, Reinhold Hedtke, Lisa-Marie Schröder, Theresa Steffestun, Georg Tafner and Till van Treeck (Board of the AS*EER)
If you are interested in the print version of the issue, please send your request by e-mail to: kontakt@soziooekonomie-bildung.eu