Audiovisual Fiction and Politics

While interplays between politics and media are widely acknowledged, recent scholarly attention has gone overwhelmingly to traditional non-fiction media such as documentary film, television news and journalism. The proposed project approaches the media-politics nexus from the perspective of audiovisual fiction (e.g. fiction film, series) and asks how the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’ world relate to each other in an era defined by media hybridization as well as by shifting meanings of democracy. The general idea of the project is to go beyond the well- established research domains focusing on extreme cases such as overt propaganda cinema, activist documentaries or censorship practices. Instead, the project to be developed would focus on two strands of research that mobilize audiovisual fiction to investigate how different people make sense of politics today:

(1) Developing participatory audiovisual methods with specific populations aimed at understanding their experiences with political topics. Given the current expertise in the research group and the REEL BORDERS project (ERC Starting Grant) participatory filmmaking methodologies in the context of migration and borders would be a logical focal point.

(2) The circulation, appropriation and sense-making of audiovisual fiction among specific communities, ranging from activists to politicians and from institutional actors to citizens. The underlying idea in this approach would be to study how fictional reference points are used in concrete and ‘real life’ contexts for ideological, activist and political purposes.

The historical and geographical focus can be defined in dialogue with the supervisor. Preference is given to qualitative methods such as content analyses, ethnographies, participatory and creative methods.

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