Updated the blog a bit.

Small update of the blog.
Trying to keep up with my schedule!

Okay my dissertation is progressing and the first 10 days lead to 573 datasets!

YES - already passed the minimum number of completed datasets I needed for my thesis, and already past the halfway point of a good large data set ;)

Thanks to the Johannes Kepler University Linz and Paris Lodron University Salzburg!

Yeah IGN does not really do journalistic work. But those memes are getting really interesting for me.
Can special interest media even do "journalism" and survive?

Okay... The mighty GAF has even a gooooood long thread on the whole issue of gaming journalism!

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=497024

Women and media industries in Europe

And just a short follow up to my last post:
Susanne Kirchhoff and me are the Austrian research team for the new project funded by the "European Institute for Gender Equality"(EIGE) and we have now reached stage 3 of the project - conducting interviews with female journalists in Austrian media.

Homepage: http://womenandmedia.eu/

Young female journalists - a favourite topic of mine...

Yesterday the newest edition of Momentum Quarterly was published.
And it contains a peer-reviewed article in German by Martina and me.

We are proud to have it published in a starting open access journal.

Look it up: "Jung, weiblich und Journalistin: Endstation Prekrariat?"

Oxford and journalism ethics

Just a short heads up...
We - that is Roman Hummel, Susanne Kirchhoff and me, Dimitri Prandner - were at the" Journalism Ethics: Individual, institutional or cultural?" and presented our paper that gave insight to some of the more pressing issues in Austrian journalism regarding ethics and regulation.

Weblink: Confernce HP
Paper is currently under review and thus we are not able to hand it out at this time, but the sildes are available upon request.

Book Review (German) - Conflict, Citizenship and Civil Society

This is short book review regarding the following collection:

Baert, Patrick, Sokratis M. Koniordos, Giovanna Procacci u. Carlo Ruzza (Ed.):
Conflict, Citizenship and Civil Society;
Routledge, New York 2010

Sorry that the review is in German, but in short: It's a great collection on the current discussion on citizenship issues in Europe, even if a bit more cohesion would have been great.


Link to review: CCC - Book Review

Full papers and the blog

In the future I will offer some full papers on the blog, as long as they are not firmly rooted in the social sciences and may be primarly interesting people outside the academia.

They will all be under creative commons and I invite everybody to read and cite them. Enjoy them and feel free to provide feedback!

Finally my copy of the collected edition "Soziale Ungleicheit und soziales Kapital" arrived in Salzburg :)

The paper of Martina and I is to befound on pages 91 to 96 and I'm proud of the short chapter detailing why young and female journalists have to fight against structural challanges in the Austrian journalistic field.

The longer, follow up article "Jung, weiblich, Journalistin: Endstation Prekariat?" which was written by the same team over the last few month will be published in the "Momentum Quarterly" journal soon.

Bibliographic Information:
Lettner, M. / Prandner, D. (2012): Übermacht der grauen Schreiber: Das soziale Kapital ist fest in den Händen alter Männer in Fh Johanneum: Soziale Ungleichheit und Soziales Kapital. Graz: FH Joanneum Eigenverlag, p. 91 - 96.

Batman and Identity...

Claiming the cowl – Dick Grayson’s Batman as seen by the online community ‘Scans_daily’ 

Abstract

To fight his war on crime Bruce Wayne created the identity of Batman, but decades of publication history led to several other characters donning the legendary cape and cowl. The latest of those was Dick Grayson, once the first Robin and later Nightwing, who claimed the Batman’s mask in 2009, after his predecessor disappeared and writer Grant Morrison explored the idea if Batman can truly be more than the man behind the cowl.

But how did the fans react to this change? A comprehensive analysis, based on a sample of thematically relevant comments and postings written during Grayson’s time as Batman at the webpage of the comic book fan community ‘Scans_daily’ tries to both answer this question, as well as identify distinctive groups of fans reacting especially strong to the changes in the Batmen’s world. 

Download the Article here:

Dick Grayson as Batman, as viewed by Online Communities

Cite as: Prandner, D. (2012): 'Claiming the Cowl’ at Popculturesociologist.

Originally planed for a peer-reviewed, non-scientific publication I decided to post it here and offer it under creative commons guidelines for everyone. Be aware that while it was reviewed and adjusted to peer-feedback it is only scientifically informed, but in no way a scientific article!
All copyrights for the variant cover of 'Battle for the cowl' lie with DC comics and the responsible artists and the picture is only used as an illustration.

Work Work Work

1010 coded for my Ph.D.-Thesis...

Never thought it would be that much of a strain.

Using maxQDA and SPSS 20 simuntaniously for the best results is very hard ... At least my Girlfriend is playing Assassins Creed in the background keeping me sane. For now.

Updating and Work in Progress

As you see I finally try to get this blog up and running.
Please bear with me as I update my scientific activities over the last year... :)

Cheers!

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)

Social Poverty - Magazine Article

A short text I produced, after I was asked to explain the connection between social and financial poverty for a magazine in Upperaustria.

It is short but I think it gives a very nice description of the problem.

Download the aticle here:
Soziale Armut / Social Poverty (Sociology / Public)

Cite as: 'Prandner, D. (2012): ‚Wieso finanzielle Armut zu sozialer Armut führt.’ at Popculturesociologist.

Originally published in: Mühl4tel-News, May 2012. All rights remained with the author.

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)

First peer-reviewed Article form the 'Journalismus im Wandel'

The article 'WE USED TO BE QUEENS AND NOW WE ARE SLAVES' by Roman Hummel, Susanne Kirchhoff and me has been published by 'Journalism Practice'.

It is online and can be accessed under:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17512786.2012.667276

The first project based, peer-reviewed article I have written with others since I joined the University of Salzburg. We had it a long way coming and as our journalism practice based projects are now in it's second funded phase, I hope we will have the chance to get some writting done.

Cheers! Thanks to Roman Hummel and Susanne Kirchhoff for welcoming me to such a great team.