Journalism Challenged: Understanding Performative Publics through Media Practice

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Margreth Lünenborg
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 418375831

Based on a practice theoretical framework, this project develops a new understanding of how “performative publics” (Lünenborg/Raetzsch) emerge. Taking into account the conditions of quotidian practices with digital and networked media, the project asks what role journalism continues to have in relation to other forms of public articulation. The project draws on three strands of current research: Research on the transformation of journalism under digital and networked conditions, research on the gendered dimensions of publics, and theoretical developments of using practice theory to understand media change and social change. The project analyses challenges to journalistic authority arising from individual articulations of ‘personal publics’ and publics emerging through civil society actors. Empirically, the project investigates two theoretically motivated case studies. The first will reconstruct the emergence of various publics around the sexualised attacks on women on New Year’s Eve 2016 in Cologne (#KoelnHbf). As a second case, we analyse and ethnographically observe the debate about power abuse around #Metoo, focusing especially on the different temporalities of short term news cycles in journalism and the long term mobilising efforts of civil society actors. The analytic approach combines digital methods, content analysis, expert interviews and ethnography, to analyse how links between elements of practices (materiality, competences, and meanings) create gendered speaker positions.Through analysing transgressions between ‘layers of publicness’ from personal to public communication and vice versa, the diversity of discursive positions in performative publics can be analytically modelled.The project investigates the following research questions.1) How and to what degree do professional journalists, civil society actors and individuals become involved in the emergence of performative publics in both cases? What patterns are perceivable in the linking or rupturing of elements of practice among these three groups over time?2) What is/was the specific role of journalistic practice in both cases? How and to what degree do individuals and civil society actors challenge journalists or journalistic practices? 3) How are gender, class and race/ethnicity articulated in the performative publics of #KoelnHbf and #Metoo? Which speaker positions become visible in these discourses, which positions remain hidden or are marginalised? What comparative dimensions can be employed to systematise challenges to journalistic authority and patterns of networks among non-journalists?The aim of the project is to establish an innovative practice-based approach in journalism studies. By including marginalised speaker positions across media formats and platforms, the approach investigates the emergence of performative publics and outlines core challenges for journalism in an expanded public space of communication.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants