Situating Media. Ethnographic Inquiries into Mediation

This summer school addresses current methodological and theoretical challenges of qualitative media‐studies. Conventionally, media have been understood as transcending time and space. More recently, however, mediation and the movement of media actors and media products across space are explored in terms of actor‐media‐networks. This perspective allows scholars to situate media practices and to identify “communities of practice” that evolve in and through the circulation of signs, things and persons. If we regard media as quasi‐objects that create, shift, and translate agency, the battle cry of actor‐network theory becomes an imperative for media‐ethnography across the disciplines. “Follow the actors” challenges us to “follow the natives” and to take into account human and non‐human elements in order to understand how “scaling is achieved by the actors themselves” (Latour).