Imagined Communities: Space-Related Constructions of Cities’ Collectivity in Times of Analogue Media

Research Centre for Media History is part of the research network “Transforming Communications.” Within this network, the goal is to establish a research project regarding how media history emerges and analyses the imagined communities of Hamburg and Leipzig, as well as their transformation in a changing media environment of progressing mediatisation. Our basic premise is that the communicative figurations are becoming increasingly diverse and the relation of their formation to their locality is becoming “more indirect” with the changes in media. These identity formations, which are related to locality, and their link to media, do, however, in part, differ considerably in diachronic and synchronic comparison. What are the interactions of these formations concerning political and social transformations? We assume that the transformation of these communities were already shaped by an increasing spatial expansion, social contingency, optionality, along with segmentation and exclusion in times of analogue media. Dr. Hans-Ulrich Wagner will coordinate the preliminary work of this project on media history. Prof. Dr. Inge Marszolek† (Univerity of Bremen) coordinated the preliminary work with Dr. Wagner until August 2016.