Promotions

Linda Leuschen

This PhD project examines how political meanings are created and normalized in digital communication spaces through seemingly apolitical lifestyle content. The focus is on German-language stagings of femininity on social media platforms, in particular so-called Tradwife videos, which aesthetically stage traditional ideas of family, gender and social order and thereby open up points of connection for right-wing populist patterns of interpretation, for example through the valorization of certain family models, the construction of social crises or the devaluation of emancipatory positions.

From a linguistic and multimodal perspective, the project analyzes how linguistic, visual and auditory resources interact to implicitly convey political positions and interpretations of the world. Of particular interest are the strategies through which such content appears as apolitical everyday life or lifestyle, while at the same time certain social concepts of order are made plausible and normalized. The aim is to make visible the mechanisms by which political meanings are produced and disseminated in digital public spheres through the staging of the apolitical.

Hanna Poloschek

In the context of the still young linguistic study of conspiracy theories, the dissertation project focuses on their plausibility through argumentative structures. Conspiracy theories, understood as specific bodies of knowledge in the context of sociology of knowledge research, are by definition not recognized bodies of knowledge in today's social contexts. The fact that they nevertheless have the potential to be plausible is shown, among other things, by the electoral success of populist to (right-wing) extreme political groups, in Germany in particular the AfD party, which is classified as right-wing extremist in parts, and whose political communicative strategy regularly makes use of conspiracy theory arguments (cf. Römer/Stumpf 2019, Stumpf 2020, among others). The regularity and patterned nature of such topoi can be empirically demonstrated as topological discourse formation (following Römer 2017). As part of the dissertation, various conspiracy theories defined in terms of content are examined for their specific argumentative structures with the help of a linguistic topos analysis and comparative overarching patterns are worked out that serve to make them plausible. The conspiracy theory reference corpus (VerReKo) developed in the DFG project "Language in Conspiracy Theories" serves as the data basis.

Momo model cat

Is walking upright on two feet something so great that the race that calls itself human can presume to rule over all of us who walk along on fours with a more secure balance? But I know it, they imagine something great about something that is supposed to sit in their heads and that they call reason. I have no real idea what they mean by it, but this much is certain, that if, as I may infer from certain speeches of my master and patron, reason means nothing more than the ability to act with awareness and not to play stupid tricks, I would not exchange it with any man. - I generally believe that one only gets into the habit of being conscious; one comes through life and to life, but one does not know how. At least that's how it was for me, and I hear that not a single person on earth knows how and where they were born from their own experience, but only through tradition, which is often very uncertain. Cities argue about the birth of a famous man, and so, since I myself know nothing decisive about it, it will always remain uncertain whether I saw the light of day in the cellar, on the floor, or in the wooden stable, or rather did not see it, but was only seen in the world by my dear mother.