Verantwortung als professionsethische Reflexionsfigur. Medienpädagogische Professionalisierung unter postdigitalen Bedingungen.

The article discusses “responsibility” as a professional-ethical reflexive figure of media pedagogical professionalization under post-digital conditions. Drawing on debates about the significance of data and platform infrastructures as well as generative AI, it argues that responsibility is prominently addressed within professionalization discourses, yet is frequently individualized through competence models and framed as a manageable qualification problem. As a result, structural relations of power and governance tend to recede from view, while pedagogical relationships are translated into standardized and (semi-)automated processes, and AI-generated content can no longer be clearly attributed to a specific person. Responsibility thus appears as an ambivalent category situated between freedom and guidance, self-governance and external control—a dilemma that becomes visible through the very discourse of responsibility. In response, the article draws on the posthumanist concept of “response-ability” and reformulates responsibility as a relational, situated capacity to respond within sociotechnical assemblages. By referring to the triple mandate in social work theory, the conditions and possibilities of such response-ability are structured along four dimensions: scientific knowledge, professional-ethical orientation, human rights-based normative foundations, and relational stance. Responsibility is thereby conceptualized as a conflictual practice shaped by infrastructural dependencies.