Working Group 5: Media

The working group investigates how media in pluralistic societies create trust and mediate conflict and reflect these processes at the same time. Taking into account the increasing pervasiveness of digital media, the working group studies the operational and aesthetic aspects of mass media (press, TV), film and literature, telecommunications, and social media, as well as functional media in law, economics, governance and politics and their formal and informal uses. The methodological approach of the group goes beyond content-, text-, and technology-centered analyses and takes aesthetic, legal and economic factors into account.

Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger

Principal Investigator

Profile, contact and publications
Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger, *1969, is professor of cinema studies at the Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft at Goethe Universität Frankfurt, where he directs the Graduate Research Training Program “Konfigurationen des Films” (www.konfigurationen-des-films.de) and the area studies project CEDITRAA – Cultural Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation in Africa and Asia (www.ceditraa.net). His research covers film theory, film and media history, documentary forms, and organizational media and supply studies. He earned his PhD from the University of Zurich in 1999 and served as the Krupp Foundation professor of documetanry forms at Ruhr-Universität Bochum from 2004-2011, before moving to Frankfurt. He is a member of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature and of the Academia Europea. He is a co-founder of NECS – European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (www.necs.org), the founding editor of the Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (www.zfmedienwissenschaft.de) and a past president of the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (www.gfmedienwissenschaft.de)

Contact
E-Mail
Phone: +49 (0) 69 798 32077

Postal address
Goethe-University Frankfurt
IG-Farben-Building
Room 6.353
Norbert-Wolheim-Platz 1
60323 Frankfurt

Publications on the research topic
From Miasma Theory to Digital Ghost Town: Tales of Infrastructure and Social Politics in the 21st Century Megalopolis. In: Saswat Das, Ananja Roy Pratihar (Hg.): Technology, Urban Space, and the Networked Community. London: Palgrave Macmillan 2022, 217-242.

Sichtbares Unrecht. Zur normativen Kraft des Dokumentarischen. In Rainer Forst, Klaus Günther (Hg.): Theorie normativer Ordnungen. Berlin: Suhrkamp 2021, 478-501.

How to Fight a Pandemic with Status Elevation. The Home Shopping Governance of Donald J. Trump. In: Philipp Dominik Keidl, Laliv Melamed, Vinzenz Hediger, Antonio Somaini (Hg.): Pandemic Media. Preliminary Notes Towards and Inventory. Lüneburg: meson press 2020, chapter 35 https://pandemicmedia.meson.press/chapters/activism-sociability/how-to-fight-a-pandemic-with-status-elevation-the-home-shopping-governance-of-donald-j-trump/

Can We Leave the Cave and Have It Too? On the Meaning of Cinema as Technology. In: Hidalgo, Santiago (Hg.): Technology and Film Scholarship. Experience, Study, Theory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2018, 213-238.

Epistemology of the Checkpoint. Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battaglia di Algeri and the Doctrine of Counterinsurgency. In: Lee Grieveson, Haidee Wasson (Hg.): Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex. Berkeley: University of California Press 2018, 157-176.

PD. Dr. Florian Hoof

Postdoc

Profile, contact and publications

PD Dr. Florian Hoof is postdoc in the ConTrust Cluster Initiative at Normative Orders and associated lecturer in Media Studies, both at Goethe-University Frankfurt. His research interests include media history, organization studies, digital cultures, distribution and media industry studies, STS, and non-theatrical film. He studied media and cultural studies, sociology, political science, int. relations in Germany and Australia and received a scholarship of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes both as a student and as a PhD candidate. He was visiting professor at: Department of Film and Media Studies, Università Cattolica, Milano, Department of History of Technology, ETH Zurich, and held a temporary position as a W3-Professor for Media Systems and Organization at University Paderborn. Furthermore, he was scientist in residence at: University of Sydney Business School, University of California, Irvine, and University of New South Wales. Before joining ConTrust, he was a research associate at the DFG-Kollegforschungsgruppe Media Cultures of Computer Simulation, Leuphana University Lueneburg. His monography “Angels of Efficiency. A Media History of Consulting” was awarded the “Geisteswissenschaften International” translation grant from the Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels.

Contact
E-Mail
Phone: +49 (0)69 798-31511

Publikationen im Forschungszusammenhang
Hoof, Florian 2022: Das Problem der Generationen in der Computergeschichte. In: Wichum, R., Zetti, D. (eds.) Zur Geschichte des digitalen Zeitalters. Geschichte des digitalen Zeitalters. Springer VS, Wiesbaden, 31-51, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-34506-8_3.

Hoof, Florian 2020: Angels of Efficiency. A Media History of Consulting. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hoof, Florian 2020: Media of Trust: Visualizing the Pandemic, in: L. Melamed, P. D. Keidl, V. Hediger, A. Somaini (eds.) Pandemic Media. Preliminary Notes Towards an Inventory, Lüneburg: Meson Press, 231-240.

Hoof, Florian, Sebastian K. Boell 2019: Culture, Technology, and Process in ‘Media Theories’: Toward a Shift in the Understanding of Media in Organizational Research, in: Organization, Vol. 26, Nr. 5, 636–654, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1350508419855702.

Hoof, Florian 2015: Live Sports, Piracy and Uncertainty: Understanding Illegal Streaming Aggregation Platforms, in: R. Lobato, J. Meese (eds.) Geoblocking and Global Video Culture, 86-93.

Dr. Viktoria Kraetzig

Profile, contact and publications
Viktoria Kraetzig, born in 1990, studied law at Humboldt University in Berlin and completed her legal clerkship at the Kammergericht. During her doctoral studies at Goethe University, she first worked as legal counsel of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for which she still regularly writtes as a freelance journalist. She later worked as attorney at law in Berlin, specialized in intellectual property and media law. She completed her PhD entitled “Copyright Law as Censorship Law” in late 2021. She has been a postdoctoral researcher at Goethe University since 2022. She is re:constitution Fellow 2022/2023 with research stays at the Court of Justice of the European Union and at the University of Cambridge (King’s College). Her research focuses on copyright and media law. She also teaches at Freie Universität Berlin in the Department of History and Cultural Studies.

Contact
Homepage
Email

Postal address
Lehrstuhl Prof. Peukert
ExNO PF-012
Campus Westend
60629 Frankfurt am Main

Publications on the research topic
Kraetzig, Viktoria, Europäische Medienregulierung – Freiheit durch Aufsicht?, NJW 2023, 1485-1490.
Kraetzig, Viktoria/Jannis Lennartz, Grundrechtsschutz durch Algorithmus? Das Urheberrecht als Menetekel automatisierter Rechtsdurchsetzung, NJW 2022, 2524-2530.
Kraetzig, Viktoria, 2022, Das Urheberrecht als Zensurrecht, 2022, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

PD Dr. Pavan Kumar Malreddy

Principal Investigator

Profile, contact and publications
Dr. Pavan Malreddy teaches at the Institute of English and American Studies. He specializes in 20th and 21st century comparative Anglophone literatures & cultures with a regional focus on East Asia, Africa, and South Asia and with a thematic focus on conflicts, communal bonds, insurgencies, and populism. He has authored essays on figures and themes as wide-ranging as Aung San Suu Kyi, Salman Rushdie, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Indian cinema, Brexit, populism, terrorism, and the civil war in Burma, among others (see full list of publications). He has interviewed prominent novelists and theorists such as Arundhati Roy, Yann Martel, Homi K. Bhabha, Mohsin Hamid, Tom McCarthy, Amit Chaudhuri, and Tabish Khair. His current research project focuses on the armed insurgencies in India, Burma, and Nigeria. He co-edits Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium, and the South Asian and Middle Eastern volumes of The Literary Encyclopedia. He is affiliated with the research group Democratic Vistas (Institute for Advanced Study, Bad Homburg), Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, and Moving Cultures Masters Programme.

Contact
Website
E-Mail
Phone: +49 (0) 69 798 32356

Postal address
Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main
Faculty of Modern Philologies
Institute of English and American Studies
Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1
60323 Frankfurt am Main

Publications on the research topic
2022 ‘Im Konflikt verbunden: Der Staat, die Straße und das organisierte Misstrauen/Bound by Conflict: The State, the Street and Organized Distrust in India’s Communal Violence’. Special Issue ‘Vergemeinschaftung durch Misstrauen? (ed. Greta Wagner) WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 2 (22): 97-105.
 
2022 ‘Postsecular Longings? Religious Dissent, Faith, and Gurus in Indian Cinema’. Third Text 35 (5), https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2022.2049159 .

2021 ‘The Syntax of Everyday Injustice: A Conversation with Arundhati Roy’. Special issue ‘Crisis and Recovery’. Wasafiri 107, 41-49.

2020 (co-edited with Michael C. Frank) Narratives of the War on Terror: Global Perspectives. Oxon and New York: Routlegde.

2020 (with Anindya S. Purakayastha and Birte Heidemann) ‘Discoursing Populism: Types, Typologies and Contexts’. Special Issue of Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium 5 (2): 1-8S.

Dr. Laliv Melamed

Associate Member

Profile, contact and publications
Laliv Melamed is an assistant professor of film and media studies at the University of Groningen. She writes on governance, sentimental politics and the public sphere in nonfiction media and documentary. Melamed is the author of Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence (University of California Press, 2023). In 2020, with the break of the pandemic, she launched a collaborative project titled Society for Sick Societies published by Social Text online, and co-edited Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Towards an Inventory (Meson Press, 2021). Her current research centers on military optics and aspects of state secrecy, titled Optics of Opacity: The Cultural Imaginaries of Operative Images. In addition to her academic career, Melamed is a film programmer and curator. She works for Docaviv Film Festival, and has curated programs for The Left Wing film club and Oberhausen Film Festival.

Contact
Website
l.melamed@rug.nl
Phone: +31-631984090

Postal address
Oude Boteringestraat 23, office no 0116
9712 GC, Groningen

Publications on the research topic
Melamed, Laliv 2023: Sovereign Intimacy: Private media and the Traces of Colonial Violence, Oakland: University of California Press.

Melamed, Laliv 2023: “A NonReport: The Operative image and the Politics of the Secret,” in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 62:4. (forthcoming).

Melamed, Laliv 2022: “What is a Girlfriend? Toward a Political Concept of the Girlfriend”, in: Discourse: Journal of Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 43:3, 421-446.

Melamed Laliv 2021: “Operative Imagineries”, in: NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Fall 2021, #Futures, 59-65.

Melamed, Laliv 2021:  “Seeking an Advice: A Political Economy of Israeli Home Videos”, in: Enrique Fibla and Masha Salazkina (eds.): A Global History of Amateur Film Cultures, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 95-111.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Peukert

Principal Investigator

Profile, contact and publications
Alexander Peukert, Jahrgang 1973, ist seit 2009 Inhaber eines Lehrstuhls für Bürgerliches Recht und Wirtschaftsrecht mit Schwerpunkt im internationalen Immaterialgüterrecht an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Er studierte und promovierte in Freiburg i. Br. (1993-1999). Nach zweitem Staatsexamen und einer Tätigkeit als Rechtsanwalt in Berlin (1999-2002) war er wissenschaftlicher Referent und Leiter des USA-Referats am Max-Planck-Institut für Immaterialgüter- und Wettbewerbsrecht in München (2002-2009). 2008 habilitierte er sich mit der Schrift „Güterzuordnung als Rechtsprinzip“ an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. 2009-2019 war er einer der Hauptantragsteller des Exzellenzclusters „Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen“ an der Goethe-Universität. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind das Immaterialgüter-, Medien- und Lauterkeitsrecht. Diese Rechtsgebiete unterrichtet Peukert auch in LL.M.-Kursen an den Universitäten Lyon, Mainz und Strasbourg.

Contact
Website
E-Mail
Phone: +49 69 798 31477

Postal address
Goethe-University Frankfurt
Chair Prof. Peukert
ExNO PF-012
Campus Westend
60629 Frankfurt am Main

Publications on the research topic
Kettemann, Matthias C., Alexander Peukert, Indra Spiecker gen. Döhmann 2022: The Law of Global Digitality, Routledge: London.

Peukert, Alexander 2022: Das Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz: Entwicklung, Auswirkungen, Zukunft, Erscheint in: Indra Spiecker gen. Döhmann/Ricardo Campos/Michael Westland (Hrsg.), Demokratie und Öffentlichkeit im 21. Jahrhundert – zur Macht des Digitalen, Arbeitspapier des Fachbereich Rechtswissenschaft, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Nr. 2/2022.

Peukert Alexander 2021: Five Reasons to be Skeptical About the DSA, in: Heiko Richter/Marlene Straub/Erik Tuchtfeld (eds), To Break Up or Regulate Big Tech? Avenues to Constrain Private Power in the DSA/DMA Package, 2021, pp. 22-28.

Peukert Alexander 2020: Faktenchecks auf Facebook aus lauterkeitsrechtlicher Sicht, WRP 2020, 391-398.

Peukert Alexander 2018: Gewährleistung der Meinungs- und Informationsfreiheit in sozialen Netzwerken. Vorschlag für eine Ergänzung des NetzDG um sog. Put-back-Verfahren, MMR 2018, 572-578.

Peukert Alexander 2018: Urheberrecht und verwandte Schutzrechte, Juristische Kurz-Lehrbücher, C.H. Beck München, 18. Aufl. 2018, 425 S. (gemeinsam mit M. Rehbinder).

Prof. Dr. Indra Spiecker genannt Döhmann, LL.M

Principal Investigator

Profile, contact and publications
Prof. Dr. Indra Spiecker genannt Döhmann, LL.M (Georgetown Univ.), born 1970, holds the chair in constitutional and administrative law, information law, environmental law and legal theory at Goethe-University Frankfurt. She is also managing director of the Data Protection Research Institute and Ineges, Institute for European Health Politics and Social Law thereof. In additioin, she serves as director at KASTEL, the Institute of Information Security and Dependability at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) where she held a chair in constitutional and adminisrattive law, data protection law, information law and telecommunications law after her dissertation at the University of Bonn, her habilitation at the University of Osnabrück and a position as senior researcher at the Max-Planck Institute on Common Goods at Bonn.
Prof. Spiecker publishes in the entire field of public law with a special focus on information and technology law. Her research integrates insights from (behavioral) law and economics, the technical sciences, and legal theory. Her expertise is valued nationally and internationally; she is an expert witness for the legislature, for the administration including the federal government, NGOs and the business community on all questions of regulatory coping with digitization, but also in environmental law, cybersecurity, health law and technology regulation.

Contact
E-Mail
Phone: +49 (0) 69 798 34267

Postal address
Goethe-University Frankfurt
Prof. Dr. Indra Spiecker gen. Döhmann, LL.M
Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 4 / RuW 05
60629 Frankfurt am Main

Publications on the research topic
Akzeptanz von Verwaltungsentscheidungen, in: W. Kahl/U. Mager (Hrsg.), Verwaltungs-aufgaben und Legitimation der Verwaltung, Baden-Baden 2022, S. 261-300.

Staatliche Entscheidungen unter Unsicherheit, ca. 500 S., i.E. Tübingen 2022.

Digitalisierung und Demokratie. Stellungnahme der Leopoldina: Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften, Acatech – Deutsche Akademie der Technikwissenschaften und Union der deutschen Akedemien der Wissenschaften, Halle (Saale) 2021, 74 S. (zus. mit R. Anderl, E. André, M. Bäcker, A. Breiter, J. Buchmann, T. Dienlin, Th. Faas, A. Hepp, R. Hertwig, L. Herzog, J. Hoffmann, F. Kreuter, J. Lamla, Th. Lengauer, M. Löw, B. Pfetsch, J. Simon und M. Zürn).

Profiling, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence und Social Media – Gefahren für eine Gesell-schaft ohne effektiven Datenschutz, in: W. Hötzendorfer/Chr. Tschohl/F. Kummer (Hrsg.), International Trends in Legal Informatics, Festschrift für Erich Schweighofer, Bern 2020, S. 345-372.

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Thomas Vesting

Associate Member

Profile, contact and publications
Prof. Dr Thomas Vesting has been Professor of Public Law, Law and Theory of the Media at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main since 2002. He studied law and political science (without a degree) in Tübingen from 1979-1983, received his doctorate from the University of Bremen in 1989 and qualified as a professor in Hamburg in 1996. Since 2012 he has been an associate member of the Cluster of Excellence Normative Orders.
His work focuses on legal theory. Thomas Vesting worked on a media-theoretical foundation of legal theory (Legal Theory and the Media of Law, 2018). In recent years, he has expanded the media theory of law into a cultural theory of law (Subjectivity Transformed. The Cultural Foundation of Liberty in Modernity, 2023). He is currently writing a (small) cultural history of law. This examines the influence that the technical culture of industrial society had on the processes of the formation of legal normativity in Germany between 1870 and 1914.
Thomas Vesting was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (2000-2001), Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin (2004-2005) and Research Fellow of the DFG (2008-2009). He has also received the Opus Magnum Fellowship of the Volkswagen Foundation (2017-2019). He has also been awarded an honorary doctorate from the Instituto Brasiliense de Direito Público (IDP), Brasília (2017).

Contact
Homepage
E-Mail
Phone: +49 (0)69 798 34273

Postal address
Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 4
FB 01/RuW
60629 Frankfurt

Publications in the research context
Vesting, Thomas 2021: Gentleman, Manager, Homo Digitalis. Der Wandel der Rechtssubjektivität in der Moderne. Weilerswist.
 
Vesting, Thomas 2018: Legal Theory and the Media of Law, Cheltenham/Northampton.
 
Vesting, Thomas/Campos, Ricardo 2022: Content Curation – Medienregulierung für das 21. Jahrhundert, KritV 1/2022, S. 3-22.
 
Vesting, Thomas 2022: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Structures of the Modern Public Sphere, in: Carlos Blanco de Morais/Gilmar Ferreira Mendes/Thomas Vesting (Hrsg.), The Rule of Law in Cyberspace, Cham, S. 149-164.
 
Vesting, Thomas: Direkt zu den Leuten. Die funktionale Interpretation der Rundfunkfreiheit und die neuartige Environmentalität intelligenter Computernetzwerke, in: Spiecker gen. Döhmann/Westland/Campos (Hrsg.), Demokratie und Öffentlichkeit im 21. Jahrhundert – zur Macht des Digitalen. Nomos, S. 205-228.

Prof. Dr. Johannes Völz

Principal Investigator

Profile, contact and publications
Prof. Dr. Johannes Völz (born 1977) is Heisenberg Professor of American Studies, Democracy, and Aesthetics at the Institute of English and American Studies, Goethe-University Frankfurt. He serves on the Board of Directors of Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften Bad Homburg, Frankfurt’s Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, where he launched and co-directs the research focus “Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Atlantic World” (with Prof. Dr. Gunther Hellmann). He also serves on the editorial board of WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the journal of the Institut für Sozialforschung. He currently leads the DFG research project “American Literature and the Transformation of Privacy.” Moreover he is designated speaker of a Graduiertenkolleg initiative on “The Aesthetics of the Democratic Way of Life.” Prof. Völz received his dissertation from the John F. Kennedy-Institute of North American Studies of the Free University Berlin and his habilitation from Goethe-University Frankfurt. He was awarded a Heisenberg Professorship by the German Research Foundation in 2016. Over the course of his career, he has spent five years of research in the U.S., at Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. His work lies at the intersection of literary studies, cultural studies, aesthetics, and political theory. In the context of ConTrust, he focuses on the research field of political media aesthetics and affect. In the Summer term 2022, he is Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences, Vienna. From Winter 2022 to Summer 2023, he will be Senior Fellow at the Käte-Hamburger-Kolleg for Global Cooperation Research, Duisburg.

Contact
Website
E-Mail
Phone: +49 (0) 69 79832364

Postal address
Regine v. Puttkamer
Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1
Room 4.212
60629 Frankfurt am Main

Publications on the research topic
Voelz, Johannes. The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

“Populism and the Politics of Distrust.” The People: Belonging, Exclusion, and Democracy. Hg. Benjamin Kohlmann und Matthew Taunton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022 (forthcoming)

Voelz, Johannes. “Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I: The Populist Space of Appearance.” Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) 34 (2018): 203–228.

Voelz, Johannes (with Tom Freischläger). “Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization.” Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) 35 (2019). 261–286.

“Reading Populism with Bourdieu and Elias.” Reading the Social in American Studies. Hg. Astrid Franke, Stefanie Müller, Katja Sarkowsky. New York: Palgrave, 2022. 233-258.