No. 4 - Inge Marszolek und Yvonne Robel: Mediengeschichte als Geschichte kommunikativer Figurationen. Überlegungen zur Untersuchung von Identitätskonstruktionen im urbanen Raum

The significance of the media for the constitution of societies and — associated with this — for negotiation processes of orders and norms has increasingly become the focus of historical studies in recent years. However, it should be noted that that theory-based explanations of current phenomena from the perspective of communication or media studies are incorporated into this historical research only to a limited extent, if at all. At the same time, the depth of mediatization is repeatedly emphasized in mediatization research. the depth of mediatization (Krotz et al. 2012), the transferability of the concept to historical concept to historical objects of investigation, especially in a longer perspective, has hardly been done so far. The interdisciplinary research network, “Communicative Figurations. On the media-driven transformation of social realities” (Universities of Bremen and Hamburg). The historical subproject “Collective Identities: Spatial Identity Discourses in Hamburg and Leipzig 1919–1975” (Marszolek/Wagner/Robel) attempts to uncover complex interactions between media and society. In doing so, we aim to at least partially overcome previous limitations of historical media research.

About the authors

Inge Marzsolek
Inge Marszolek taught history and cultural studies at the University of Bremen until September 30, 2012. She was a guest lecturer at the International Institute for Holocaust Research
(1999/2000) and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (2001). She is a member of the research group “Communicative Figurations in Transition” (Hamburg/Bremen).

Yvonne Robel
Yvonne Robel has been working as a research assistant in the sub-project “Communicative Figurations of Media Discourses in Historical Change” of the Creative Unit “Communicative Figurations” of the ZeMKI, University of Bremen, since July 2013. Previously, she worked as a research assistant at the Institute for History at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg and as a research project assistant at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University of Bremen. In 2012, she completed her doctorate in Bremen (Dr. phil.) with a discourse-analytical thesis on political-public genocide thinking in Germany. Yvonne Robel studied cultural studies, ethnology and East and Southeast European / Southeast European Studies at the Universities of Leipzig and Halle (Saale). Since 2007 she has been teaching cultural studies and history.