Universality of decentralised media and ideology in the era of post-politics. The case of refugee crisis in Croatia during September 2015

Centre for Southeast European Studies

 

UNI Graz

 

brownbag seminar

 

Location:

RESOWI, LS 15.03, C/EG

 

 

Date:

Tuesday, 3 May, 2016 – 13:00 to 14:00

 

Speaker(s):  Katarina Peović Vuković (University of Rijeka and Visiting Fellow at CSEES)

 

 

Description:

The project explores the discursive practices, knowledges and believes present on the Internet of the Post-Yugoslav countries in specific cases such as refugee crisis in Croatia during September 2015. The focus of research is on the gap between official media and the social networks that act as a dark underside of symbolic practices in public media. The comparison between official and the unofficial media shows that the Internet functions as a form of social unconsciousness of new Post-Yugoslav social reality while allowing expression of the opinions and believes banished from official media. While both argumentation, official and unofficial, are not without their inner inconsistencies, the Internet groups function as fruitful field for disclosing the hidden trauma of Post-Yugoslav context.

 In order to arrive to collective unconsciousness, the project will introduce psychoanalytical reading of the media coverages of specific events such as the refugee crisis in Croatia during September of 2015. The concept of the dream work will serve as analytical matrix for understanding the gap between concerns with violation of borders (claiming that such violation endangers national integrity) and open hatred towards Muslims present on the Internet. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Sigmund Freud introduced the dream work as a difference between manifest and latent content of a dream. Distortions presented at the level of the manifest content of a dream are to be seen a result of dream work which aims at resolving a conflict(s) present at the latent level. The gap between official and unofficial media reflects two sides of public opinion and consequently two sides of collective psyche – the first – conscious side where censorships intervene in order to cover traumas and conflicts and the second side – the Internet as unconsciousness where defend mechanisms are released.

 

http://www.suedosteuropa.uni-graz.at/en/event/2016/universality-decentralised-media-and-ideology-era-post-politics-case-refugee-crisis