In this article, we investigate labour struggles under the condition of digital capitalism. The main research question this paper addresses is: How do German unions evaluate and respond to the rapidly accelerating digitalisation of economy and work? Based on a series of interviews with union representatives in Germany, we trace recent developments in an increasingly digitised economy and outline ...

This theoretical chapter offers an integrated interdisciplinary model for the study of mediated cultural communication. Firstly, I describe the model and acknowledge preceding approaches that focused on similar issues. I show the intrinsic connections between aesthetic form, production, reception and reproduction, and argue for the necessity of studying all these components together to gain a ...

The present contribution maps materialist advances in media studies. Based on the assumption that matter and materiality constitute significant aspects of communication processes and practices, I introduce four fields of inquiry - technology, political economy and labour, the body, and ecology - and argue that these perspectives enable more comprehensive understandings of the implications of ...

The present chapter engages with the formal framing of friend and foe in the war genre. Asserting the significance of film for cultural forms of memory and a politics of the past, I sketch out the generic conventions through which particular notions of self and other are inscribed, before I conduct an analysis of Clint Eastwood’s <i>American Sniper</i> (2014) to flesh out what I term a cosmologic ...

The present article provides a critical introduction to concepts of estrangement. After referring scholarly debates about origins, mutual relations, and legacies of concepts such as Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie, Bertolt Brecht’s V-effect, and Augusto Boal’s spect-actor, I critically review earlier applications of these concepts in game studies and point to some problematic aspects of these endeavors. ...

Situating itself in the field of cultural memory studies, this article traces the slow emergence in German historical discourse of the narrative of an anonymous German woman who survived the Soviet occupation of Berlin in 1945. I will, firstly, conceptualize the historical condition of the Anonyma as a precarious liminal sphere of transition between competing sovereignties that dislodged her political ...

The title of this chapter, seeing and thinking borders, can be read in three different ways. It might refer to, firstly, the obvious fact that I try to adequately see and think borders - to subject processes of bordering and their contingent results to critical scrutiny. Or, secondly, the title might indicate that the acts of seeing and thinking themselves border - that perception and cognition are ...

In March 20223, the sixth synthesis report penned by the International Panel of Climate Change (Lee et al. 2023) was released. As earlier, the assessments are dire reading and yet again witness of trends going into the wrong direction on almost all important accounts; increase in CO2 emissions, underperforming attempts at cutbacks, rising temperatures on a global scale, missed targets, unpaid ...

In this chapter we present a theoretical framework to facilitate teaching and learning about, rather than with and through, audio-visual media in upper-secondary education in Norway. Drawing upon Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, we show how aspects of production, form, reception, and reproduction can be approached in school contexts to treat audio-visual media as more than allegedly neutral ...

The present article provides an analysis of the narrative and technical devices through which contemporary war films frame audience engagement with characters. It compiles and systematizes a wide set of empirical findings and exemplifies these through brief, illustrative readings of a selection of films. Combining Smith’s approach to film reception with insights from Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of ...