Kulturwissenschaften
Refine
Document Type
- Working Paper (2)
- Article (1)
Language
- English (3)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (3)
Keywords
- Germany (3) (remove)
Institute
Public health authorities in Germany regard communication as a crucial part of infectious disease prevention and control strategies. Communication becomes even more important during public health crises such as pandemics. Drawing on Briggs and Hallin’s concept of biocommunicability, we analysed the German National Pandemic Plan and key informant interviews with public health experts, critical infrastructure providers and ambulance services. We examined the projected expectations towards the behaviour of the audiences and the projected ways of information circulation informing public health communication strategies during a pandemic. Participants shared the expectation that the population would react towards an influenza pandemic with panic and fear due to a lack of information or a sensationalist media coverage. They associated the information uptake of their target audience with trust in their expertise. While our informants from public health conceptualised trust in terms of a face-to-face interaction, they sought to gain trust through transparency in their respective institutional settings. Our analysis suggests that this moved health information into a political register where their medical authority was open to debate. In response to this, they perceived the field of communication as a struggle for hegemony.
This paper discusses the implications of transnational media production and diasporic networks for the cultural politics of migrant minorities. How are fields of cultural politics transformed if Hirschmann’s famous options ‘exit’ and ‘voice’ are no longer constituting mutually exclusive responses to dissent within a nation-state, but modes of action that can combine and build upon each other in the context of migration and diasporic media activism? Two case studies are discussed in more detail, relating to Alevi amateur television production in Germany and to a Kurdish satellite television station that reaches out to a diaspora across Europe and the Middle East. Keywords: migrant media, transnationalism, Alevis, Kurds, Turkey, Germany
The sovereignty of the European nation states in the realm of security politics is gradually eroding. At the same time the European integration to a large degree influences the level of direct bilateral police cooperation, since cross-border crime has come to be perceived not as only a national, but as a common problem for the European nation states. At the German-Polish border, "Europe's Rio Grande", these high expectations concerning security policy are put into practice. With Poland's EU accession, Polish and German border guards are no longer spatially separated, but jointly control travellers. Joint patrols and contact points have already existed since 1998. On the one hand, the enforced meeting of German and Polish border policemen may help dismantle mutual prejudices. On the other hand, other cleavages may appear, based on cultural, systemic and institutional factors, which hinder the development of mutual trust and reinforce the asymmetrical relationship between the Schengen member Germany and the "junior partner" Poland.