Reading as a Social Practice – Research Forum

Barbara Bausch is a literary scholar at the Cluster of Excellence 2020 Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her [Barbara Bausch´s] research interests focus on 20th- and 21st-century literature, particularly forms of political and experimental writing. In her research project READING READING, she examines reading as an aesthetic and social practice—both theoretically and through exploratory formats—drawing, among other things, on phenomena such as unreadability and practices of collective reading. Most recent publications: Standortbestimmungen. Strategien literarischer Selbstpositionierung (ed. with Julia Weber, Berlin Universities Publishing 2025), Illegibilities Reflecting Reading (ed., Textem 2025), and Spielformen der Störung. Ror Wolfs radikaler Realismus im Kontext experimenteller Prosa der 1950er–1980er Jahre (transcript 2024).

In my research, I focus on current phenomena and trends in reading: What and how do people read today, how do we talk about reading on social media oder in newspapers? Particularly interesting to me is the construction of masculinities: Which books are recommended to “men,” and how are men who don’t read, who read performatively or with great enthusiasm perceived, discussed, and often turned into memes? Overall, I’m interested in BookTok and the books discussed there. Right now, I’m devouring sports romances (insider tip: Heated Rivalry) – purely out of academic interest, of course!

I am writing my dissertation on reading scenes in 19th-century journal literature. I am particularly interested in this period because it is the century of literacy, and reading scenes allow us to trace the reading habits and practices of people from different social classes and genders. The journal as a medium also played an important role at that time, which is why it serves as the central starting point for my work.

Jola Vollmer’s research focuses on feminist reading practices in philosophy. These practices critically examine the composition of the philosophical canon, question gender hierarchies and gendered categories within philosophical texts, and reflect on androcentric working methods. Thus, feminist reading practices combine a critique of the androcentrism that continues to shape philosophy with an attempt to read canonical texts differently and apply them to contemporary issues. In her project, which is part of the ‘Reading as a Social Practice’ forum, she explores the extent to which feminist reading practices inherently contain a social dimension, and considers how focusing on the sociality of reading might open up new perspectives for these practices.

As a sociologist of culture and art, Madeleine Span’s research focuses on the digital practices and affordances of contemporary society. In the context of “Reading as Social Practice”, she is particularly interested in the motives and patterns of behaviour of communities of reception within the digital sphere. In her dissertation, she analysed self-publishing in the context of a society of singularization and as a phenomenon of the contemporary literary sphere. In her current FWF Esprit-funded project (Grant DOI: 10.55776/ESP3180326), she extends this perspective to social media platforms, investigating how artistic researchers’ work practices in digital spaces are shaped by communities and platform logics.

My research focuses on digital reading cultures and the ways in which social media platforms are transforming reading practices and literary participation. My current project, “Digital Reading Culture and Literary Communities on Social Media: A Study of Online Book Review Spaces,” examines platforms such as BookTok, Bookstagram, BookTube, and Goodreads as spaces where readers share, discuss, evaluate, and collectively shape literary experiences. In particular, I am interested in how these digital interactions contribute to the formation of online literary communities and reshape reading as a social and participatory practice.

I lead the THOR project (The Habit of Reading: History, Philosophy and Practice) at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, examining reading as an intangible cultural heritage from a historical-philosophical perspective. My research approaches reading both as a practice of attention and as a shared habit fostering social cohesion and inclusion, highlighted through reading laboratories, digital media, and participatory discussion around texts.

My research focuses on transmedial and transgeneric storytelling in children’s and young adult media as well as on intersectional questions. Approached through the lens of reading as social practice, my current interest lies in how processes of literary evaluation shift when they move from institutionalised gatekeepers – literary criticism, juries, adult mediators – to digital reading communities. Reading as social practice thus emerges as an ambivalent procedure, one that builds community while simultaneously producing exclusions.

In my project, I am interested in the technological and sociotechnical conditions of reading as the perception and interpretation of text. Using methods from philosophy of technology, the project investigates how the deployment of AI could preserve, transform, or undermine the particularized knowledge that (literary) reading is taken to cultivate (particularly narrative imagination). LLM’s and other AI will likely have ambivalent effects on specific reading skills and the epistemic conditions underlying reading practices that need to be individually assessed. On the negative side, there is a risk that LLM’s could erode our notions of textuality and authorship. On the positive side, AI could benefit reading by enabling more people broader access to diverse ranges of materials, by assisting people with disabilities or reading difficulties, and by opening new possibilities for creating and engaging with the written word.

I investigate the literary-theoretical ideas held by people who engage with literature outside of professional or academic contexts. Do “everyday readers” believe that the meaning of a text depends on the author’s intention? Do they think there is a single “correct” interpretation of a work? And what do they actually mean when they use the term “literature”? To explore these and related questions, I use quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze discussions and reviews on digital platforms such as LovelyBooks or Amazon.

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At the center of my research is reading as a social practice, as well as the question of how digital media environments transform its conditions through the emergence of what I conceptualize as the user dispositif. I understand the user dispositif as a historically emergent mode of addressing subjects as users, through which use, affective participation, and value creation become interconnected in digital environments. My project examines how interface architectures, media affordances, and recurrent usage scripts shape modes of perception and action, thereby producing and structuring forms of literary reception and aesthetic experience.