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Talkin’ bout a Revolution. Jarmila Mildorf on the Fictionality of Conversational Storytelling
Full text linkRezension zu: Mildorf, Jarmila: Life Storying in Oral History. Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, 2023. 211 pp. USD 114.99. ISBN 978-311107226
Disruptive Narratives. A New Research Program
Full text linkIn this article, we seek to delineate a new research program that involves the analysis of disruptive narratives. The term covers conspiracy narratives, stories spread in the context of disinformation campaigns, and populist discourse, but also radical challenges to our life styles. Some of these stories propose largely invented (or fictive) realities, while others are still clearly fact-based. What all disruptive narratives have in common is their potential to shock: they try to present radically alternative events and thus urge their recipients to challenge established authorities. For us ‘disruption’ is a descriptive and thus ethically neutral term that merely signals an interest in disturbing a given political order. Such stories deserve greater attention because they play an ever more important role in the public spheres in Western countries such as Britain, Germany, or the US. We will thus address questions such as: How are these narratives structured? What about the interplay between the content and the form? What are these stories trying to achieve? What about their ideological ramifications or political consequences? Who spreads them? Who feels attracted by them
German Welcome Culture Then and Now. How Crisis Narration Can Foster (Contested) Solidarity with Refugees
Full text linkThe initial response of German civil society to the so-called European refugee crisis in 2015/2016 is often framed as a welcome culture. How does this narrative of solidarity relate to the narrative of crisis which dominated European migration policy at the time, giving rise to right-wing populism in several member states of the European Union? And how does it differ from the narrative of solidarity we have been recently witnessing in the wake of the ongoing war in Ukraine, which has caused new refugee movements toward Europe? This article sets out to investigate the dynamics of narratives of public solidarity with refugees in Germany by juxtaposing what is now often called the “long summer of migration” with representations of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Drawing on insights from crisis research and interdisciplinary narrative research, I will first argue that framing of historical conditions as crisis situations is based on the interplay of retrospective and prospective worldmaking – a key concept in the philosophy of mind and cognitive narrative theory – which sets in motion a complex (counter-) narrative dynamics. I will then proceed to investigate how such dynamics played out in the periods under investigation: Public debates of the refugee ‘crisis’ of 2015/2016, I will show, produced diverging counter-narratives (i.e., pro-migration vs. anti-refugee narratives) that competed for discursive hegemony, whereas representations of the war in Ukraine generated a widely shared narrative of solidarity with refugees
Narratives of Crisis vs. Narratives of Solidarity. Analyzing Discursive Shifts in Austrian Media Coverage of Refugee Movements from an Interdisciplinary Perspective
Full text linkWhen unprecedently large numbers of refugees from Middle Eastern countries fled to Europe in the years 2015 and 2016, the media depicted these events as a moment of crisis that put European cohesion to the test. Ever since the beginning of the so-called refugee crisis, framing migration as a problem that requires solving had been a common practice in European media. Yet media coverage of migration drastically changed in February 2022: After Russia had invaded Ukraine, causing millions of Ukrainians to flee their home country, the persistent crisis narrative eventually made way for a narrative of solidarity. This article traces the reasons and outcomes of this discursive shift by examining, from the perspective of interdisciplinary narrative research, how migration was framed and presented in journalistic interviews published in Austrian newspapers, including tabloids and broadsheets, in September 2015 and March 2022. The article’s combination of methods from the social sciences and the humanities offers an analysis of not only the migration frames and the speakers’ positioning that become manifest in the interview sample (qualitative content analysis), but also the narrative strategies and stylistic devices that are used in the migration narratives emerging from these texts (discourse analysis and narrative analysis). The particular utility of this innovative interdisciplinary multi-method approach, the article argues, is a comprehensive discussion of migration narrative in media that also addresses frequent shortcomings of disciplinary analysis
Narrative, Scale, and Two Refugee Crises in Comparison in Italian Media
Full text linkBringing together narrative theory, migration studies, and contemporary discussions in the environmental humanities, this article considers the significance of the concept of scale for media narratives on migration. The starting point is that migration is a multiscalar phenomenon that ranges from migrants’ personal experience to the global factors (such as poverty and climate change) that shape migration on a planetary scale. Media narratives are often unable to bring together those scales, privileging the scale of regional or national debates at the expense of migrants’ experience or global phenomena. We discuss that idea through the qualitative analysis of migration coverage in the Italian media, focusing on two newspapers (Corriere della sera and Il Giornale) and two periods in 2015 and 2022. We thus compare what is frequently described as the refugee “crisis” of 2015 and the wave of migration created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The analysis shows that, in both newspapers, migration coverage in 2015 was marked by a disconnect between local and global events, whereas in 2022 the event structure of the war afforded closer integration between scales. This suggests that, even when no simple causal link can be established between the causes of migration and its effects, more efforts are needed to project a complex, nuanced image of migration in media storytelling
Migration and Narrative Ecologies. Public and Media Discourse in the EU
Full text linkThis survey article paves the way for a new exchange between migration studies in the social sciences and narrative research on migration in the humanities by introducing the concept of a narrative ecology of migration. Taking our cue from previous research on cultural, media, and narrative ecologies, we argue that narratives on migration travel through different cultural and discursive contexts where they encounter other stories which either sustain or challenge their significance. Our argument unfolds in two steps: After providing a survey of previous research on narrative ecologies, which we see as a subset of media ecologies, we describe the levels of the narrative ecology of migration by discussing the ways in which different narratives on migration, as well as stories of migration, interact with each other on local, national, and European scales
On the Significance of Digital Epitexts. Virginia Pignagnoli Examines how Digital Epitexts Shape Post-Postmodernist Narrative Poetics
Full text linkRezension zu: Virginia Pignagnoli: Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2023 (= Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series) 158 pp. USD 79.95. ISBN 978-0-8142-1542-
Erzählte Affekte und radikale Entwertungen von Anderen. Psychosoziale Funktionen von Abjekten
Full text linkThe significance of emotions for human practice has been receiving increased attention in various disciplines recently. In sociology, an affective or emotional turn was diagnosed already two decades ago, and parallel trends appear in both (narrative) psychology and philosophy. This article outlines an affect and emotion theory perspective for figuration, micro-sociological and social respectively cultural-psychological conflict research. It then introduces Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytically defined concepts of the “abject” and “abjection”. After some definitional clarifications, we illustrate the heuristic, hermeneutic and explanatory potential of these theoretical concepts by drawing the empirical example of the relationship between Alevis and Sunnis in post-migrant Germany. These are embedded in historical “relations of injury and harm”, in which not only excessive physical violence, but also psychological and symbolic violence has been exercised and suffered. The radical, abjectivising devaluation of people of the Alevi faith played a major role in this. We argue that the resulting demarcations, contact blockades and practices of exclusion, which continue to this day, cannot be adequately understood without recourse to their affective-emotional foundations
Doing Trust – Precarious Practices
Full text linkReport on the Workshop “Trust, Crisis, Catastrophe III: Practices”, organized by Nina Doejen, Gerald Hartung, Katharina Kalthoff, Florian Kappeler, and Cécile Stehrenberger, January 18–20, 2023, University of Wuppertal (Germany
Losing Trust. Altaf Tyrewala’s No God in Sight and Githa Hariharan’s In Times of Siege as Threat Communication
Full text linkThis article discusses two Indian English novels, Githa Hariharan’s In Times of Siege and Altaf Tyrewala’s No God in Sight, first published in 2003 and 2005, respectively, both of which deal with the rise of Hindu nationalism in India at the turn of the millennium. The novels can be described as ‘crisis narratives’ in the sense that they represent in narrative form what the authors perceive as a serious political crisis in which trust is lost. Since both texts deal with the crisis not in retrospect, but at a moment when it is still unfolding, the texts can be regarded more specifically as instances of ‘threat communication,’ a communicative act that identifies a threat to an existing order. Although both novels negotiate the same social crisis, they speak from different vantage points and foreground distinctive aspects and perspectives. Thus, trust, its absence, and its contraposition, distrust, are shown to play different roles in the two narratives