ECREA 2010

Bremen.
The next session at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference starts with Stefan Hauser and Martin Luginbühl, whose focus is on textual analysis. Their background is in linguistics, and they are interested in moving beyond the idea that culture, language, nation, and territory form one unproblematic entity – more promising is a more flexible definition by which cultures articulate themselves along a variety of dimensions.

They take a praxeological understanding of culture, therefore: respecting the performative as well as semiotic dimension; taking culture as a category of both content and form; and seeing language as a reflection on spatial affiliation as well as a means of creating space. This connects to contrastive textology, which through parallel text analysis (the comparison of parallel textual corpora) has shown that genres vary according to national and language borders.

Bremen.
If it’s Monday, this must be (a very chilly) Bremen – I’ve made it to the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ conference that is itself a pre-conference to the European Communication Conference (ECREA) in Hamburg. We start today with a keynote by Sonia Livingstone, who begins by noting the importance of cross-national research, but also the difficulties in scaling up research in this way. What are the key problems here, then – intellectual, political, and practical, not least also for multicultural and multinational research teams?

There is also a strong push towards the international sharing of research outcomes, of course; there is significant growth in large-scale research projects, and this is driven by the imperative to understand global communications phenomena. But when is it reasonable also to retain some boundaries around projects? Comparative research is at the cutting edge of research in media and communication, but has yet to be fully thought through – organisationally, methodologically, and from many other perspectives. Two key areas can be distinguished here: cross-national research, and open-ended cross-border mapping of transnational media flows. Published projects often tend to turn out to be hybrid, however – theoretical principles are not always translated into methodological approaches.