6 The Quest of Participation: Studying from the Perspective of Practice Theory

Instead of viewing study as a matter of effective learning—as it is done in the current discourse on “digitalization,” we approach study from the viewpoint of “participation,” that is, on the grounds of a shared practice of world disclosure or world building. Drawing on a phenomenological attitude, we describe various study practices, such as reading and writing and listening and speaking in their correlational and suspenseful constitution. The (ambiguous) affects and attunements and how they bring about intellectual involvement point toward our main conclusion: study is about opening the space of knowledge (re-)formation. The delay and deceleration of study points to the university as a liminal institution (Waldenfels)—an institution that does not close itself off from that which still has to be studied.