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New in Göttingen in February 2016: Prof. Dr. Felicitas Macgilchrist

Felicitas Macgilchrist joined the Institute for Educational Science on 15 February 2016 as Professor for Media Research with a particular focus on Educational Media. With this joint appointment between the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and the Leibniz Association, she has simultaneously been appointed Head of the "Textbooks as Media" Department at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research (GEI) in Braunschweig.

Before joining the University of Göttingen, she was research fellow and department head at the GEI, where she leads the "Memory Practices: Enacting and Contesting the Curriculum in Contemporary Classrooms" research group. She is a research associate in the NewsTalk&Text research unit at Ghent University. She has been a lecturer at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, and spent time as a Visiting Scholar at New York University, Ghent University and the University of Birmingham.

Her Habilitation at the Technical University Braunschweig, "Textbook Production: The entangled practices of developing educational media for schools", is an ethnographic discourse analysis of the production of textbooks and other educational materials for secondary schools. She gained her PhD at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, where she was a member of the DFG-Graduate College "Representation-Rhetoric-Knowledge". Her dissertation examined contemporary international media coverage of Russia and Chechnya.

Her current research lies at the nexus of media and education. She is particularly interested in the mediality and materiality of educational technology, in media use and the media practices of pupils and teachers, and in public debates about the role of new media in education. The "Memory Practices" research project explores how secondary school pupils engage with mediated accounts of topics such as colonialism, democracy and modernity. The project also examines how the material affordances of media fold into classroom practices. A further current project analyses how the topic of "media and school" is discussed in scholarly publications, educational policy and social media.

At the Georg-August-University, Felicitas Macgilchrist will be actively involved in teacher education, offering courses on the role of media/technology in schools, and research-based courses in which students will design and conduct qualitative, post-qualitative and/or ethnographic projects.