Teaching-Learning-Project: Between Iconophily and Iconoclasm

On the Role of Images in Religion and Society

This teaching-learning-project studies the objections towards images in different cultural and religious contexts, reaching from a reflected criticism to violent destruction. The (partly violent) debate about the caricatures of Mohammed or the destruction of the Buddha-Statues of Bamiyan by the Taliban – these are among examples for a contemporary and historical controversy about images. From the manifold examples, students chose one topic and develop their own research question which will then be studied in the frame of a systematic and comparative research program.

Find more information on the teaching-learning-projects of Ruhr-Universität Bochum (in German) here.

For the results of the student research and the podcast contributions, please click the German version of this project.