Research Program

Both in germanophone and international media research investigating locative and situational media processes by applying locative and situational methods presently has originated mainly within different individual disciplines and for specialized problems. As yet, both in germanophone countries and in international research, an interdisciplinary research network has been lacking that explicitly addresses the consolidation of the pertinent qualitative research methods connecting them with problems of media history and the current developments in locative and situational media and in particular in "geomedia." The Research Training Group will connect the respective research of media studies with the relevant expertise of the scholars in cultural and social studies as well as with those in information technology in order to explain the recent surge of interest in the research on locative and situational media from more than just one particular development in media technology or from just one particular methodological development within the research done in media studies. The dynamics of this research area can neither be explained by technological determinism nor by trying to find an explanation that springs immanently from the discipline. The socio-technical media creations, the fluctuating and networked usage of media and the ethnographic media research are joined in a problem that seemed to have already been solved in the era of 'classical mass media'—namely, to locate and situate the relationality of their object, i.e., of the medium and its place, in a suitable way. Thus, the main theme of the Research Training Group "Locating Media" is just this convergence of the scientific, creative and practical locative and situational tasks. In view of the media practices characterizing the public discourse it is not difficult to predict that this task will occupy a future generation of dissertation projects and that the changed situating of media may possibly also generate a revision in media history altogether.

With the proliferation of qualitative media studies, an implicit consensus has currently been established that can be observed across the involved disciplines and that in the future can be moderated by germanophone media studies. A whole series of presuppositions of the earlier 'holistic' media theories and theories of modernization is now increasingly being reexamined. Countering the propensity of other cultural studies that attempt to establish media as obvious historical causes, a critical research movement is currently in process that regards media less as causes and rather as temporarily consolidated historical effects of cultural techniques. By now (and against the historico-philosophical heritage of the early media studies), those social, cultural and technological theories have gained acceptance that subvert every a priori division between micro- and macro-analyses, between structure and agency and between technological functionality and social relationships. Media reception and media production, daily routine and work of the media (and particularly where speech acts and interaction are taking place) have positioned themselves for monitoring the classical theories of the public sphere and its audience by now. In media practice and in all ethnographically analyzed places of the globalized world, their current critique and challenge is answering the use and often the subconscious adoption of theories of technology and modernization. All these revisions widely agree in underlining the practice-theoretical intersection between theories of media and technology as well as between theories of media and social theory. The aim of the Research Training Group is to intensify this practice-theoretical consent in interdisciplinary and international discussions. The consensus is methodologically manifested in an established spectrum of locative and situational methods; this wide range, however, has rarely been the subject of discussions between the different communities of practice. Therefore, efforts have to be made to discuss the hitherto still implicit media-theoretical consequences and draw the conclusions thereof. The peer review of the initial proposal has opened up three of these media-theoretical desiderata in particular and these have been taken over as individual dominant elements of the present general outline of the Research Training Group: the question of mediating media-ethnographic methods with media-historical tasks, deliberating on cultural concepts of space concerning categories of media spaces and situations, and the possibilities of the Research Training Group in contributing to the reflexivity of germanophone media studies.

The qualification concept of the Research Training Group covers a study program focusing on a well-balanced advancement and qualification of methodological and practical basic competence of the students by offering basic seminars, research colloquia, a program of visiting scholars, and workshops. Due to the media-ethnographic orientation of the Research Training Group optimally organizing the study program ensures accepting the possibility of the necessary times of absence for the fieldwork without putting too much strain on the collaboration of the students. In order to maximize and expedite the number of successful dissertations, the qualification concept of the Research Training Group envisions a two-fold contribution from the young faculty members initially involved with the proposal: mentoring those students writing a dissertation, as well as collaborating with postdoctoral students. Thus the independence of the students writing dissertations will be expressly promoted with regard to their own initiatives and their visibility within the international scholarly public will be ensured. Apart from inviting international experts for lectures, our extensive international program of visiting scholars will also host workshops and yearly conferences, but most notably we will habitually invite guest professors for longer term visits at our university in order to work and share their experiences intensely with the students of the college in our study program, for example in summer schools. Apart from that we are planning to cooperate internationally in order to ensure the possibility for our students to take part in study programs at our partner universities as guests.

We envision a Research Training Group in which historical and current research, creative and theoretical competence, methodological and corpus-based discussions will mutually complement and adjust to each other. This complementary approach has already been put to the test and could be refined successfully during the last years within the scope of a graduate school pre-financed by our university. In the course of preparing for this proposal, the preparatory group of scholars has continually been internationalized and has created international connections to pioneers in all pertinent fields of locative and situational media studies as well as in all subjects concerned with studies in media, historiography, politics, ethnology, linguistics, media information technology, media geography and in science studies. The current Research Training Group is also based on a series of events and publications at Siegen University that since 2005 have contributed to the development of this research idea. Contributors were, among others, the Colloborative Research Centre SFB/FK 615 "Media Upheavals" with a group of young scholars who carried on research in "Media Topography of Social Spaces." During this time, conferences have taken place on "Locative Media" (2007) and on 'miniaturizing' media ("Reduce to the Max", 2007), on changing scales of media ("Mikro Makro Medium", 2008) as well as on the qualitative methodology of Gegenwartsforschung (Studies in current states of affairs) entitled "Schnitte durch das Hier und Jetzt" (Dissecting the here and now), 2008. In the course of a lecture series entitled "Medienumbrüche vor Ort" (Local media upheavals) in 2009, the first results of this research were presented. The graduate school also took part in the annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (Vienna, 2009) with a section of its own that in 2011 was published as "Raum als Interface" (Space as interface). Apart from this, in 2010 the school organized an international conference in Siegen on "Medialität der Nähe" (Mediality of proximity), published in 2011. With the panel discussion "Locate Yourself! Mobile und webbasierte Praktiken der Selbstverortung" (Mobile and web based practices of self-localizing) in July 2010, the school also took part in the conference "HyperKult XIX" in Lueneburg and it conducted the seminar "Vor Ort und Anderswo. Mediale und kulturelle Topographien" (Locally and elsewhere. Topographies of media and culture) in July 2010 together with doctoral students of the University of Basel (Switzerland) and last but not least in January 2011 and in cooperation with the project of the German Research Foundation (DFG, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) "Kulturgeographie des Medienumbruchs analog/digital" (Cultural geography of the media upheaval analogue/digital) the school was able to bring together international experts who discussed questions of neocartography in Siegen entitled "Mapping Maps".