Iris Laner

Univ.-Prof. for subject didactics / Art Education⋅Department Fine Arts & Design⋅School of Music & Arts Education (SOMA)⋅Institute for Open Arts

Iris Laner has been Professor of Fine Arts and Visual Education at the University Mozarteum since 2019. Since 2017, she has been conducting research on criticality in the context of aesthetic experience as part of her research project "Aesthetic Practice and the Critical Faculty. Examining the Educational Conditions of Aesthetic Experience", funded by the Austrian FWF under the Hertha Firnberg Program.

In her current work, Iris Laner is particularly interested in the dimensions of aesthetic judgment and in collective practices of dealing with artefacts from art and culture, in addition to the possibilities of non-verbal expression of criticism in the context of physical and pictorial statements. After her doctorate, which traces the temporal dimensions of the image in the writings of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida and was completed at the University of Basel in philosophy in 2012, she researched and taught at the University of St. Gallen, the KU Leuven and the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. She wrote her dissertation as a fellow in the graduate college “Image and Time” of the NFS Image Criticism eikones. Due to her studies in philosophy and fine arts on the one hand and her teacher training in the subjects of fine arts education and philosophy and psychology on the other hand, she has a great interest in both philosophical and practical aspects of aesthetics. The volume "Aesthetic Education for Introduction" published by Junius Verlag in 2018 testifies to her efforts to promote the dialogue between philosophical aesthetics and art education in accordance with this dual interest. Her art education research includes theory building and conceptual work as well as qualitative studies and didactic reflection. The essay "Seeing in community: About knowledge and insights in the course of collective aesthetic experience", published in 2021 in the context of art education positions, documents her current interest in the role of the community in aesthetic and art education discourse. Iris Laner is co-editor of the book series "Experience-Oriented Educational Research" (Beltz Juventa) and "Objections: Transdisciplinary Texts on Art and Education" (LIT Verlag). The focus of her work is on art education theory formation, aesthetic, educational theory and visual science research and didactic reflection.