Prof. Dr. Gerhard Lauer 

Contrary to the general perception, young people in particular are reading and writing more than ever. Publishers and bookshops can hardly keep up with the trends of young people’s reading, while a not insignificant proportion of children and youth can no longer read adequately. The subject of my research is the dynamics of the current reading and writing worlds of young people.

To this end, I use data from digital reading and writing platforms such as Wattpad or Goodreads, reading data from e-book readers, and data from surveys on social news aggregators such as reddit, panel studies, and conversations with publishers and bookshops. In initial studies, my group has already been able to show the dimensions in which young people in particular share stories with each other on these platforms, which genres, characters, and plots are of specific interest to them and what creative freedom and self-expression in writing and reading literature means to them.

Reading research in Germany, however, is not as established as it is in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries. My research would, therefore, contribute to a better understanding of the importance of reading and writing stories for children and young people in Germany. During my stay at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, I would like to evaluate the large data collections and work on a theoretical model of cultural socialization.