29.10.2026

Contradicting Racism on Social Media

DFG Funds New Subproject on the Media Practices of Migrant-Positioned Women

Prof. Dr. Tanja Thomas (Chair of Transformations of Media Culture) and Dr. Melanie Mika investigate how migrant-positioned women contradict racist structures of oppression on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

The German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding a new research unit on media practices of contradicting with two subprojects located in Tübingen. The subproject “Post-migrant Media Practices of Contradicting: Anti-racist Interventions by Migrant-Positioned Women on Digital Platforms,” headed by Prof. Tanja Thomas with the collaboration of Dr. Melanie Mika, examines the interventions of women who position themselves as migrant and who face racial discrimination in Germany with particular frequency. The focus is on media practices on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. The project asks under which conditions anti-racist interventions reach publics at all: platform logics favor hate speech and incitement, and algorithmic discrimination produces new invisibilities. As a result, digital spaces for marginalized voices are shrinking, becoming riskier, and increasingly limited in their emancipatory potential. The project combines qualitative content analyses of media practices and communication cascades with media go-alongs, interviews, and focus group interviews to unpack strategies for dealing with attacks as well as solidarity and support structures.

The research unit 6017 “Media Practices of Contradicting in Networked Publics” (MePraWi) examines the significance of contradicting for democratic societies and the mediated conditions under which it enables or endangers participation, particularly in the context of social inequality. Seven projects in communication and media studies at five German universities analyze these dynamics from both contemporary and historical perspectives. A second Tübingen subproject, “Erosion of Democratic Values: Excluding Forms of Contradicting by Right-Wing Actors in Digital Publics,” led by Prof. Dr. Annett Heft, is based at the Institute for Research on Far Right Extremism (iRex). The research unit is designed for a first funding phase of four years and runs until 2031.