Seminar

Countering antiziganistic media representations

How are Roma framed as outsiders in the media, and how are these narratives resisted and negotiated by those affected by antiziganism?

Countering antiziganistic media representations

Producer:

UiB

Main content

Hegemonic patterns of representation, such as exoticisation, demonisation, precarisation and criminalisation, framing Roma as outsiders, have been reproduced across media for centuries.

In this seminar, Melanie Kuhn will draw on interviews and focus groups to discuss how these portrayals are received, negotiated and resisted by those affected by antiziganism.

She will also explore the multiple ways in which their resistant media practices challenge these powerful narrative patterns.

Furthermore, she will address how publicly visible resistance to antiziganism in the media also requires the complex and precarious management of social positioning and belonging.

These issues demonstrate that strategies of voicing, self-representation, and counter-storytelling in the media have their inherent ambivalences and create their own specific vulnerabilities.

Melanie Kuhn is a professor of educational science with a main emphasis in childhood and migration studies at Heidelberg University of Education, Germany.

Kuhn’s primary research areas are discrimination, inequalities, and professionalisation within the educational system. In her latest study, she investigated antiziganism in the media as part of a research consortium.

She is co-editor of Overlapping Inequalities in the Welfare State. Strengths and Challenges of Intersectionality Framework (with B. Akkan, J. Hahmann, C. Hunner-Kreisel, Springer nature 2024) and Early Childhood Education in Germany. Exploring Historical Developments and Theoretical Issues (with B. Bloch, U. Stenger, M. Schulz, W. Smith, Routledge 2022).

The seminar is opent to all. A light lunch will be served.

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This event is organised in collaboration with IMER Bergen.