Critical Studies in Media and Communication – serie

How are the structures of power and the notion of agency among Syrian women during the recent Syrian conflict connected? To explore this matter, Rand El Zein investigates gender politics around displacement, conflict, the body, and the nation. In doing so, she outstandingly reconciles critical media theory as myriad and productive with the theoretical concepts on subjectivity, power, performativity, neoliberalism, and humanitarian governance. The book examines how the Arab television news discursively represented the experiences of Syrian women during the conflict in relation to the four main concepts: violence, vulnerability, resilience, and resistance.

Against the background of the media commercialization reform since the 1990s in China and drawing on the case of »X-Change« (2006–2019), Wei Dong investigates the affective meaning-making mechanism in the multimodal text of Chinese reality TV. The focus lies on the ways in which emotions are appropriated and disciplined by regimes of power and identity, and the ways in which affect – in this case primarily kuqing (bitter emotions) communicated by the material and the body – have the potential to challenge or exceed existing relations of power in the mediascape. Wei Dong shows how Chinese reality TV provides a historical and theoretical opportunity for understanding the affective structures of contemporary China in the dynamic process of fracture and integration.

What if James T. Kirk and Spock had a baby, left the Enterprise and moved to New Vulcan to live happily ever after?Fan fiction plots like this are a strong testament of fans' endless creativity. Not only do the authors invent their own storylines but they have developed a generic definition of content across fandoms according to the relationship present in the text. Classification is therefore profoundly related to gender and sexuality. Julia Elena Goldmann examines these generic structures and formulaic patterns comparatively in Star Trek and Supernatural fan fiction. She also focuses on the interplay of the concepts of gender, sexuality, relationships and depictions of family in these texts.

Restitution, reparation, renaming – the colonial past is omnipresent in today's cultural, political and academic debates. Christina Haritos sheds light on the post-colonial power dynamics that shape these discussions by analyzing German and Namibian journalistic coverage of the Herero and Nama genocide, with a focus on the German-Namibian genocide negotiations between 2015 and 2021. She thus offers a much-needed entangled perspective on how journalism evokes colonial memories to maintain or challenge colonial power relations. The study shows how journalism navigates colonial gaps in the archive to render certain perspectives (in-)visible and to determine whose past can be used to make claims for a common future.