This research colloquium for media studies gives postgraduates and scholars the opportunity to present and discuss their current doctorate and research projects within a collegial environment.

ORGANISATION
ZeM Board of Directors
COORDINATION
Dr. Adelheid Heftberger, ZeM

Reisen mit/durch/auf Facebook – Sozio-technische Dynamiken facebook-inhärenter Urlaubsfotografien
Carolin Anda (ZeM)

The dissertation focuses on tourist amateur photographs that are distributed and used on the social network Facebook. The expansion and easy accessibility of social media over the past 12 years has led to new ways of using private material and media practices that have changed the way private photographs are handled and received. Social practices of photography – such as showing and exchanging photographic material with friends and acquaintances and photo albums or documenting experiences – migrate to the social network Facebook and are integrated into the network architecture. There, specific media practices, image distributions and actor relationships emerge through the operating functions of the interfaces, various modification and participation possibilities (e.g. like and share functions, hashtagging and geotagging) and through the underlying technical infrastructure. Vacation photographs represent negotiation areas of private, commercial and technical interests that stabilise the network, fix and influence media and socio-technical actions and provide important information about photographers’ travel preferences, travelled distances and individual image content.

The work is based on the interdisciplinary field of network research and its associated current theories on forms of visual culture, new media, digitality, socio-cultural ways of using media, tourism theories and socio-technical theories of action. One of the theoretical premises of the thesis is the assumption that holiday photographs have an agency generated in the social network, which can be updated and reproduced in different ways in the process of reception, participation and socio-technical/socio-medial concatenations. The dissertation is interested in the technical and user-generated ways of use and distribution mechanisms as well as in the media prerequisites and conditions for such forms of updating private photographic material that enable the emergence of visual worlds of experience. This interest in knowledge requires an examination of the photographic pictorial material and its possibilities of participation/modification as well as socio-cultural, socio-technical and media-scientific theories.

Turning Kurdish memories into films: The representation of ‘home’ as a domestic/personal archive
Dr. Özgür Çiçek (ZeM)

Kurdish cinema, categorized as such since the 2000s, is a transnational cinema that is produced from various locations including Germany, France, UK, Turkey, Rojava, and Iraqi Kurdistan. Now that Kurdish people are dispersed in many countries their history writing is limited to the individual attempts of Kurdish history writers and academics. The absence of the Kurdish archive or history writing created a tension that released itself through young motivated filmmakers who used cameras like a pen to write their history, that was mainly shaped by the memories they listened from their parents, grandparents, or relatives. In this sense many Kurdish filmmakers from Turkey make personal documentaries that reveal their unrepresented personal histories.
When we look at Kurdish films produced in Turkey one recurring theme is the representation of ‘home’ as the place where all personal records are stored and kept. For instance in Zeynel Doğan and Orhan Eskiköy’s The Voice of My Father (2012) the basement of Base’s home is where she keeps all the vocal letters, clothes, and belongings of her husband. For her ‘home’ is more than a place where one feels most comfortable, but it’s also a castle made up of her personal memories. Leaning on this background in this presentation I will first provide a short background on Kurdish filmmaking practices in Turkey. Further I will focus on the representation of ‘home’ in Kurdish-German director’s fiction and documentary films. Through looking at the films by Ayşe Polat, Miraz Bezar, Yüksel Yavuz, Soleen Yusef, and Rezan Yesilbaş I will question the function, and the visual aesthetics of ‘home’ in German Kurdish directors films. The questions I will explore are how do the themes of home and homelessness represented in Kurdish-German director’s films? How do Kurdish-German filmmakers aestheticize or destruct the image of ‘home’ in their films? Furthermore, how do the recently migrated Kurdish filmmakers from Turkey represent or problematize home? Does home stand for the locus of the family roots, or a place where one feels safe and unthreatened due to her national identity? What is the function of home as a domestic archive that stores traces of unrepresented /undocumented personal or national histories?