Who is "everyone"?
Analyzing media practices of (national) belonging

Modern mass media, as Irmela Schneider puts it with reference to Foucault, address "everyone and at the same time each individual, omnes et singulatim". This twofold logic of collectivization and individualization points to fundamental questions about media and power, about processes of self-government and the government of others, and about practices of inclusion and exclusion that organize social belonging — and, ultimately, it points to a question already raised by Brecht in his radio theory: Who counts as "everyone"? Taking this impulse as its starting point, the workshop seeks to bring together methodological approaches from Medienkulturwissenschaft, media culture studies, and neighboring disciplines that allow us to analyze the (re)production of (national) belonging in both historical and contemporary media cultures.

At the center of these discussion stands nationhood, which continues to operate as a powerful category of social organization and collective subjectivation, even though the disappearance of the nation in globalized media environments has been proclaimed for decades. We aim to address the medial conditions, configurations and deconstructions of national belonging, while also asking about emergent or alternative forms of collectivization. In the spirit of a critical-historical perspective, the workshop further seeks to reflect on Eurocentric genealogies of national orders and to engage with post/decolonial approaches. At the same time, attention will be directed to concrete media and affective practices, as well as politics of sound and image, through which (national) belonging is negotiated and made experiential in everyday life.

The aim of this workshop is to discuss and bring into dialogue approaches from different disciplines, in order to make the borderlands between various (media-)scholarly research cultures as productive as possible. We hope to bring together scholars from Medienkulturwissenschaft with more sociologically and communication-studies-oriented colleagues to discuss the relationship between "nation" and (mass) media. At the same time, we welcome contributions from a diverse range of neighboring fields, such as musicology, theatre and art studies, sound studies, affect theory, visual culture studies, cultural and postcolonial studies, nationalism studies, political science, (contemporary) history, human geography, and more. Both theoretical-methodological reflections and case studies of historical or contemporary media practices are welcome.