Suchergebnisse

In the 1950s, the Federal Republic of Germany had to cope with a situation referred to at the time as "Verkehrskrise" (traffic crisis). In a relatively short time span, the number of cars on German roads had increased rapidly, as well as the number of accidents and fatalities. Correspondingly, efforts in traffic education were heavily intensified. By examining public campaigns and expert discourse, the article explores how the notion of self-control gained more and more acceptance among road safety experts, and eventually helped to establish a paradigm change in Western German traffic education. In the course of the three decades from the 1950s to the 1970s, the focus shifted from enforcement by appealing to reason and disciplinary endeavors to the internalization of adequate behavior on the road and competence behind the wheel. Traffic education aimed to motivate road users to regulate themselves and to improve their ability to adapt to traffic situations. It tried to establish a specialized "seventh sense" as the core element of vernacular risk practices on the road. The notion of self-control, as implemented in public campaigns and other road safety activities, relied on societal models and certain notions of social and political order. These included, in particular, traditional family and gender roles, Christian religious values, and democratic freedom. Therefore, road traffic can be regarded as a cultural concept with road safety as a discursive arena. In that sense, road safety does not appear as a static state but was in a state of flux just as traffic itself was. Thus it required self-control and routinized yet flexible practices to improve the resilience of each individual road user to the risk of accidents as well as the resilience of the traffic system itself.

In the 1950s, the Federal Republic of Germany had to cope with a situation referred to at the time as "Verkehrskrise" (traffic crisis). In a relatively short time span, the number of cars on German roads had increased rapidly, as well as the number of accidents and fatalities. Correspondingly, efforts in traffic education were heavily intensified. By examining public campaigns and expert discourse, the article explores how the notion of self-control gained more and more acceptance among road safety experts, and eventually helped to establish a paradigm change in Western German traffic education. In the course of the three decades from the 1950s to the 1970s, the focus shifted from enforcement by appealing to reason and disciplinary endeavors to the internalization of adequate behavior on the road and competence behind the wheel. Traffic education aimed to motivate road users to regulate themselves and to improve their ability to adapt to traffic situations. It tried to establish a specialized "seventh sense" as the core element of vernacular risk practices on the road. The notion of self-control, as implemented in public campaigns and other road safety activities, relied on societal models and certain notions of social and political order. These included, in particular, traditional family and gender roles, Christian religious values, and democratic freedom. Therefore, road traffic can be regarded as a cultural concept with road safety as a discursive arena. In that sense, road safety does not appear as a static state but was in a state of flux just as traffic itself was. Thus it required self-control and routinized yet flexible practices to improve the resilience of each individual road user to the risk of accidents as well as the resilience of the traffic system itself. (author's abstract)

Die Dissertation von Annika Requardt untersucht Visualisierungs- und Narrativierungsstrategien im US-amerikanischen Kriegsfilm der Stummfilmzeit, indem sie die Theorie des kollektiven Gedächtnisses mit Bildanalyseverfahren kombiniert. Ob fiction oder non-fiction: Die Arbeit schlägt einen weiten Bogen vom Spanisch-Amerikanischen Krieg, über den Ersten Weltkrieg bis hin zum amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg, um zu zeigen, wie durch Verdichtung und Wiederholung standardisierte und schematisierte Bildtraditionen entstehen, die Kriege potentiell mit Sinn versehen und als nationale Identifikationsangebote fungieren können. Allerdings schließt die Autorin, ohne einen entsprechenden empirischen Nachweis zu führen, in einem rezeptionstheoretischen Kurzschluss von den Filmbildern direkt auf die Erinnerung des Krieges. Während sie das erklärende Potential des erinnerungskulturellen Ansatzes so leider nicht ausschöpfen kann, wissen die Filmanalysen zu überzeugen. ; Annika Requardt's dissertation analyses strategies of visualization and narrativization in American war films of the silent era, employing theories of collective memory and visual culture. It covers a wide range of fictional and non-fictional films that depict the Spanish-American War, World War I, and the Civil War. Requardt shows how, by concretion and repetition, there emerges a standardized and schematic tradition of filmic images that provides war with meaning, and offers a way for the nation to identify itself. However, lacking empirical evidence, the author deduces the remembrance of war simply from the existence of films and their images without taking the particular reception into account. While she therefore cannot utilize the full potential of the memory culture approach, the analyses of the films are very convincing in their own right.

Mit einem Theoriemix aus Konstruktivismus, Systemtheorie, Diskursanalyse und Wissenssoziologie untersucht der Autor das Phänomen des Medienskandals und verfolgt sein theoretisches Erkenntnisinteresse im Dialog mit dem Fallbeispiel des Friedman-Skandals aus dem Jahr 2003. Medienskandale, verstanden als ein von den Massenmedien konstruiertes Narrationsschema, werden als "Brandsätze" mit hoher publizistischer Sprengkraft begriffen, die symbolische, politische und ökonomische Macht aktualisieren. Die konsequent funktionale Perspektive fragt nach der Bedeutung von Medienskandalen für Akteure, soziale Systeme und die symbolische Ordnung der Gesellschaft.