Crossroads in Cultural Studies 2012 - Paris

I spent the first week of July 2012 in Paris and at the 'Crossroads in Cultural Studies'-Conference of the ACS and presented my paper 'How do mediatized interpretations of `traumatic‘ events emerge in the periphery – The example of 9/11'.

While I called the paper 'The Emergence of Cultural Traumata in Center and Periphery – The Example of 9/11' in my abstract it felt like the final content of it was not fitting this working title and I tried to focus on the depiction of the terrorism and how journalists in Austria - the periphery region in my study - worked on the topic of 9/11 during the last 10 years.

It was great to meet and talk with Irena Carpentier Reifova, who I had a short, but nice talk with about the role of individuals during the formation of remembered versions of the past. It was both good feedback and validation of problems that are currently wandering around in my mind.

Further it was great to see Seong bin Hwang again, who I had met last year on the IAMCR in Istanbul.

I was very glad that we presented in the same panel and had the chance to talk for a bit. His work on the medial representations of the anti-atom movement post Fukujima was very interesting. 

Further great food for thought included the panel 'Media Studies and Communication Sciences - Intellectual Dialogues Transgressing a Banal Conflict' where it once more became clear to me that I’m a sociologist and will always stay one, even when my topics may be about media or history or politics.

And the panel ‘Beyond the Sociology of tastes: Power and Postlegitimacy’ led to me reflecting Bourdieu once more. Definitly have the need to talk with several other researchers about this, but I was indeed moved…

And here a few links regarding the conference and the paper:

Conference HP: Crossroads 2012

Original abstract can be found in: Crossroads in Cultural Studies – Book of Abstracts (2012), p. 333

My presentation: Crossroads Presentation as PDF

(proceedings/paper available on demand)

Identity, changes and challenges of the profession in the 21st Century

My good friend and valued colleague Martina Lettner presented our paper 'Young, female and
journalist: less money, less job opportunities, less fame ‐ and still happy?' in Chile at the end of June 2012.


Because of the terrific Crossroads conference I had no chance to travel to Chile, but as always working with Martina has been a real joy and I hope that our next presentation will give us the chance to finally do one presentation together.

Abstract: 


A growing number of people are living in media democracies, which are largely depending on an informed and responsible public. Therefore the media function as a central link between the powerful players within a society and its less powerful members. Yet the contents of the media are created by journalists, who are part of society and individuals themselves, working under specific conditions.

Thus not only their work, but they themselves are crucial for the constitution and well-being of society and the presented paper deals with the case of the Austrian journalistic field. There the sector faced remarkable changes during the last four decades, which not only led to women entering the field, but heavily increasing the inequality within Austrian journalism, up to the point when it became undeniable. Especially young female members of the journalistic field are doubly unprivileged compared to elder male members as a recent empirical research done by the University of Salzburg in 2010 found out. The theory of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is employed to display the structure of the inequality and its reasons. Guided interviews with female journalists in Austria (conducted for this paper) display their knowledge of the inequality, their awareness of the involved risks for the media democracy, and their coping strategies. Thus it becomes necessary to discuss ways to restructure the institutional boundaries that are currently reinforcing inequality. A possible proposal is based on the idea that governmental funds and sponsoring should be specifically tied to providing equal conditions for young journalist within the individual enterprises, while putting less emphasis on creating artificial networks, for the excluded groups.

Conference HP: official Periodismo chile 2012 Homepage
Our presentation: Periodismo chile 2012 Presentation as PDF
(proceedings/paper available on demand)

6. Forschungsforum der österreichischen Fachhochschulen

Martina Lettner and I decided to participate at the "6. Forschungsforum der österreichischen Fachhochschulen", which is Graz this week.

Our paper will be later on published in a collected volume with the title: "Übermacht der grauen Schreiber" and I will provide the associated bibliographic info later on, that you can look it up.

It is part of my work that concentrates on the sociology of work in the field of journalism and I'm enjoying Martina's more journalistically informed approach very much.

Copyright for the image lie with the associated copyright holders.

Discourse, Communication, Conversation in Loughborough

During March 2012 I was in Lougbourgh and presented my paper '9/11 and the Realignment of Narratives after Cultural Traumata' at the DDC conference and visited the quite excellent methods and methodology workshop by Emily Keightley,Cristian Tileagă, and Michael Pickering.

Sadly there was not enough time for discussion at the presentation and because of a very tight program I did not get to discuss as much about my work as I hoped to, but I had the honor to meet several very interesting PhD candidates - Canada, Italy, Spain, Germany - and we had very good discussions. 

And I realized that several theoretical implications I had about my work have to be reevaluated,... Paris and the Crossroads conference may give me the opportunity to do so... 

Conference HP: official DCC Homepage

Original abstract can be found in: Discourse, Communication, Conversation - Book of Abstracts (2012), p. 71

My presentation: DCC Presentation as PDF

(proceedings/paper available on demand)

IAMCR 2011 - Istanbul

A busy, hot city and a beautiful university gave the backdrop for the IAMCR 2011 conference 'Cities, Creativity & Connectivity' and offered Susanne Kirchhoff and me the opportunity to present the paper ' Changes in Media, Changes in Practice? –The Shifts of the Journalistic Field as a Challenge' which summarized key findings from the project 'Journalismus im Wandel' from Roman Hummel, Susanne Kirchhoff and me.

While we had several technical problems and could not load our slides for the presentation, we had a very good session and came into contact with lots of interesting people and interested people.

Many great presentations were held and Susan Keith and Seobing Hwang, Andreas Hepp are only a few of the people whose presentations were from interest to me and my work on international comparisons of historisation processes.

Conference HP: official IAMCR 2011 - CCC Homepage

Original abstract can be found in: IAMCR Cities, Creativity, Connectivity - Book of Abstracts (2011), p.103 

Our presentation: IAMCR - CCC Presentation as PDF

(proceedings/paper available on demand)