Public Evening Lecture

Wednesday, 12 April 2023 | 06.00 pm | Neuer Senatssaal (main building, main campus)

THE ONLINE CULTURE WARS:
A FORMATION STORY
with John Postill

(RMIT University)

In this talk John Postill links up three distinct research areas – digital anthropology, causal ethnography and social practice theory – to track the messy, complex, open-ended effects of media practices in the making of a new digital world (Postill 2022). To this end he draws on long-term anthropological research on the ‘anti-woke’ movement – a loose transatlantic network of online personalities fighting the recent rise of ‘wokism’ that includes Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Bari Weiss and Andrew Doyle within its ranks. Extending recent sociological advances in the ethnographic study of causality, Postill tells the ‘formation story’ (Hirschman and Reed 2014) of this new movement through four critical media events, namely the Trump election, the Covid-19 pandemic, the George Floyd protests, and the Ukraine war. Each event, he suggests, yields ‘luminous’ ethnographic data (Katz 2001, 2002) about the hidden causal relations shaping this rambunctious space of ‘content creation and cultural criticism’ (Johansen 2021, 2023).

The lecture will be followed by the CMC Master Class open for undergraduate and graduate students:

Digital ethnography as a flat methodology:
Comparing hybrid and online research on digital activism

Thursday, 13 April 2023, at 10.00 am S22 (NSG (106), new seminar building)

For this class, you will have to register by writing an email to PD Dr. Cora Bender (info-memouni-koeln.de).
Then, you will receive a confirmation email and the preparatory reading