Research Training Group 3064 “Technologies of Witnessing” investigates how witnessing as a media and cultural practice is changing in the 21st century.
The German Research Foundation (DFG) is establishing a new Research Training Group entitled “Technologies of Witnessing: Media and Cultural Practices” at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). The interdisciplinary programme will investigate how witnessing is changing in the context of digitally networked media environments and current cultural and artistic discourses, while also examining the consequences this has for contemporary culture. From 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2031, the new research training group will offer 20 doctoral candidates and one postdoctoral researcher a structured and interdisciplinary research and study programme that also provides scope for the development of individual research profiles. The DFG is initially funding the research training group for five years with around 6.3 million euros. The JGU is contributing a further 550,000 euros.
“I am delighted about this success and congratulate all the scientists involved,” said Clemens Hoch, Minister of Science for Rhineland-Palatinate. “The acquisition of a new research training group is an outstanding testament to the strength of research and training of young scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, especially in the cultural sciences and humanities. The new research training group will further strengthen the research profile of Mainz University.”
Further information can be found under News. The Research Training Group website is currently under construction.
Research group at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelm University Bonn and the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation
A new power of the moving image has emerged in social media: Videos on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and other platforms are clicked billions of times every day, with hundreds of hours of additional moving images streaming in every minute. At the same time, videos have become an influential means of political communication because they spread messages quickly and effectively, move their audience emotionally and motivate them to take action, such as donating, protesting or voting.
The fact that extremist organizations such as IS and populist politicians such as Trump use this power of moving images with frightening success is much discussed. Less well known, however, is the “video activism” of civil society actors who are concerned with democratic participation, humanitarian or ecological issues. These include individuals such as Rezo, NGOs such as Greenpeace, video collectives such as Leftvision, artist groups such as Peng! and movements such as Black Lives Matter or Fridays for Future.
In order to draw attention to their concerns and create counter-publics, they have to assert themselves against entertainment, propaganda and PR in the competitive attention economy of the social web. To this end, they are developing new strategies for the production and distribution of political videos, but above all their design in new and diverse forms that contribute to their dissemination online.
Jens Eder (Film University), Britta Hartmann (Bonn), Chris Tedjasukmana (Mainz) and Tobias Gralke (Bonn/Berlin) turn their attention to this video activism from civil society.
In the project “Attention Strategies of Video Activism on the Social Web” (funded by the Volkswagen Foundation 2018-2023), they are investigating new video forms, distribution methods and production alliances in the competition for public perception and political impact. The opportunities and risks of social items are particularly evident in the example of video activism. One aim of the project is to educate people about these developments and contribute to media literacy.
The results to date are summarized in the recently published book Moving images. Political videos in social media items (Bertz & Fischer 2020); for the first time, it provides an overview of the field of political videos. The website also regularly publishes up-to-date video analyses and information for interested parties.
Dissertation project: “Media immersions and the others. Feminist, critical-phenomenological perspectives. “
The work develops a feminist, critical-phenomenological approach to supposedly omnipotent concepts of media experience – especially to the term “immersion”. It uses the frustration with the patriarchal gesture of many reception terms – their politically dangerous all-inclusiveness (cf. McMahan 2003) – as a starting point to envisage an intersectionally gender-sensitive politicization of media reception discourses. The much-used term immersion – and many other reception terms such as ‘illusion’, ’empathy’, ‘play’, disinterested pleasure’ or ‘as if’ – have so far remained ‘innocent’ despite all the criticism of the Western normativity of theoretical concepts. Immersion’ is based on discourses of naturalistic, techno-deterministic, anthropocentric, teleological and normative normalization. Simplistic juxtapositions of under-complex relationships such as immersion vs. reflection, active vs. passive users, education vs. entertainment, distraction vs. contemplation, real vs. virtual were already dominant in the 19th century and remain so today. The fact that immersion is closely linked to patriarchal norm systems is also particularly evident in the fact that, on closer inspection of historical and contemporary reports, immersion narratives are mostly used to diagnose the media experiences of other, socially ‘lower’, ‘unfinished’ subjects (especially women, young people, migrants, the unemployed, indigenous people) and thus socially delegitimize them. Media concepts are enrolled in a – surprisingly stable – gesture of othering, which carries under-complex, generalizing and exclusion-producing ideas of society, public and subject and cements them as normative evaluation patterns. The doctoral dissertation asks whether this neutrality of media concepts only remains possible because immersion remains connected to the phantasm of a bourgeois, perceptually sovereign, cis-male subject of reason and excludes all other perspectives from the formation of theory.
In September 2025, it was announced that Mücke’s doctoral dissertation had been awarded the Büchner-Verlag Young Talent Award.
