30.05.2018

Prof. Dr. Anne Kaun als Distinguished Visiting Professor am Institut

Herzliche Einladung zum Begrüßungsvortrag am 4. Juli, 18 Uhr c.t., Hörsaal Keplerstraße 2

Darüber freuen wir uns sehr: Prof. Dr. Anne Kaun von der Södertörn University Stockholm wird den ganzen Juli als Distinguished Visiting Professor bei uns in Tübingen verbringen.

Und gleich zu Beginn ihres Aufenthalts wird sie einen Begrüßungsvortrag halten, zu dem wir alle Interessierten herzlich einladen. Thema: Media at the Margins: Studying Media Practices in Heterotopian Contexts.

Der Vortrag findet am 4. Juli um 18 Uhr c.t. im Hörsaal in der Keplerstraße 2 statt.

Abstract zum Vortrag:

Media are studied through diverse frameworks ranging from large scale changes in specific cultural and political contexts captured by notions such as mediatization to micro- investigations of everyday engagement with media formats such as memes and selfies. A smaller strand of media and communication studies has also always demanded a shift beyond mainstream practices. It pushed for considering forms of mediated identity practices as resistance, social groups that are normally excluded and geographic locations outside of the Western realm. Linking to this strand of research, I suggest to also consider heterotopian spaces such as prisons, detention centers and protest camps more explicitly in our analysis of media. Heterotopian spaces are spaces of otherness that are outside the social world. At the same time, they are crucial for sustaining the idea and realization of “the good society”. They, for example, confine people, behavior, and characteristics that run counter to the utopian ideas of the good society, but they are also places where the rules and norms for good society are negotiated and implemented. Following the spatial turn in media and communication studies and drawing on theoretical notions such as social imaginaries, I argue that we can learn about values, norms and the structure of feeling of society as well as crucial media-related change by considering heterotopian spaces as parts and constitutive of society. The talk draws on six years of my research on protest movements as well as a recently started project on media practices in the context of prisons.

Biografische Notizen

Anne Kaun is Associate Professor at the Department for Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Stockholm. Her research combines archival research with interviews and participant observation to better understand changes in how activists have used media technologies and how technologies shape activism in terms of temporality and space. She is currently implementing her new project on prison media tracing the media practices and media work since the inception of the modern prison system.