Vorlesungsreihe “Manufacturing Communality? Audiovisual Appeals to ‘the Common Good’”

Abstract: Audiovisual appeals in the name of 'the common good’ are omnipresent in persuasive communication, ranging from advertisements for organ donation cards to election campaigns. However, ‘the common good’ is a purposely vague political concept, and each societal actor claims the prerogative to interpret this concept for themselves. This results in competing implicit notions of who makes up the communities thus addressed and which societal changes are needed. Audiovisual campaign videos offer multimodal understandings of who ‘we’ are as a community in order to persuade. This lecture deconstructs three common strategies for evoking communality in social and political advertising: appeals to shared feelings, evocations of shared historical imaginations, and the staging of temporally unbounded communities. Framing this approach to multimodal poetic community-building within Boltanski and Thévenot's theory on societal negotiation processes allows the analysis of audiovisual discourse formations. As an example, this lecture will discuss how campaign videos on the occasion of referendums on same-sex partnerships strategically constellate ideals of civic and domestic community.

Zusammenfassung:

Dienstag, 12. November 2024, 16.15 Uhr
“Manufacturing Communality? Audiovisual Appeals to ‘the Common Good’”
Vorlesungsreihe

mit: Dr. Thomas Scherer (Viadrina)
Englischsprachige Vorlesungsreihe des Viadrina Center for Gesture and Multimodality Studies. Teilnahme nach Anmeldung per Mail auch online möglich.
eMail-Kontakt: vcgms@listserv.dfn.de
Ort: Auditorium Maximum, Logenstraße 4, Raum 103
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