What is the best way to research a communicative figuration? How can we approach a communicative figuration as a cross-media phenomenon? And who belongs to a communicative figuration and who does not? To answer such broad and general questions, it is helpful to discuss them by considering specific examples like cultural communities. In a past research project, one of the authors of this chapter investigated the media of the Cuban American community in Miami (Lohmeier 2014). The main questions guiding the investigation were how different media contributed to creating a sense of belonging or fragmentation and which actors were in charge of media as institutions and in terms of media content. Questions about the meaning of community and belonging, such as the ones mentioned above, arose again and again during processes of data gathering and analyses. At the time of research, the Cuban American community was fragmented, heterogeneous, dispersed into several locations within the US with strong ties to a diasporic community spread across the world. Making decisions on which groups within the Cuban American community to focus on, which newspaper articles and posts to read and whose words to listen to was not an easy task. No doubt querying the choices one makes in the research process is in fact an essential part of the process. One might even argue that researchers need these types of questions, in order to produce valuable and critical work.When reconsidering this research project as whole, employing the approach of communicative figurations as a tool for data gathering as well as for analyses and findings of the research might have proven useful for a number of reasons: First, the concept of community is highly abstract. Even if we can agree on a definition of what a community is, working with this understanding on the ground is another matter. Because, second, the realities of a community are complex, diverse, even messy, we could say. Returning to the example of the Cuban Americans in Miami, the community was fragmented by generational differences and distinct experiences of migration; there were segments of the community with a lot more financial muscle and political ambitions than others. Some did not feel represented or welcome at all while others were living the American dream. Were all these individuals and sub-groups part of the same community? Third, communities are in a constant state-offlux. Some individuals purposefully decided to leave Miami and the Cuban American community behind. Does this end their belonging to the community as a whole?

About the authors

Christine Lohmeier
Christine Lohmeier is Professor for Media and Communication with a focus on comparative cultural analysis at the Center for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen. From October 2014 to November 2015 she was employed as a guest professor for the same position. Christine is co-founder of the Qualitative Methods network. Christine Lohmeier has conducted research as a visiting scientist at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and the University of Miami. From 2011 to 2015 she worked as a post-doc/assistant
professor at the Institute for Communication and Media Research at LMU Munich and was Managing Editor of ‘Communication Theory’. Christine has taught media and communication at the Universities of Stirling (2005-2009) and Rotterdam (2009-2010). She served as Book Review Editor of ‘Media, Culture & Society’ (2009-2011). Christine studied languages, business and cultural studies at the University of Passau, Germany. She was awarded an M.Sc. in Media Research at the University of Stirling and received a doctor’s degree at the University of Glasgow for an ethnographic study of Spanish and English-speaking media and the Cuban-American community in Miami, Florida.

Rieke Böhling
Since April 2016, Rieke Böhling is employed as a research associate at Faculty 9 – Cultural Studies – at the Institute for Historic Journalism, Communication and Media Studies in the subject of communication and media studies, with a focus on comparative cultural analysis (Prof. Dr. Christine Lohmeier). In 2012 she obtained her BA in American Studies at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands). As part of her BA she spent a semester at the College of Charleston (USA). Between 2012 and 2014, she studied within the Erasmus Mundus MA European Studies: Euroculture, at the University of Groningen and the University of Deusto (Spain). In her MA thesis she investigated representations of young Turkish Germans in three films from three distinct time periods. After completing her studies, she was employed as course coordinator in the consortium secretariat of the Erasmus Mundus MA European Studies: Euroculture at the University of Groningen until early 2016.