Program: Again, we are delighted to introduce two amazing speakers for that night: Rahel Winter is enthusiastic about research involving digital spaces, platform governance and the intersection of the two experienced by marginalized – namely queer – communities, both on- and offline. Following a B.A. in Library and Information Sciences and a M.A. in Digital Transformation, she is currently collecting, analyzing and visualizing data on disinformation narratives in the Russian war of aggression on the Ukraine at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW). The title of Rahels presentation is “Setting the A-Gender – German News Articles‘ Reporting on Gender-Fair Language Usage“. In a viral diagram, Torten der Wahrheit creator Katja Berlin depicts that the time expended by using gender-fair language is greatly outweighed by the time spent on debating whether gender-fair language is really society’s biggest problem at the moment – given their agenda-setting power, how do German news media portals and their digital readers contribute to this? Gender-fair language is no longer merely a topic of interest for the gender-diverse communities it aims to represent, but also a political talking point of growing importance in German news coverage that is contextualized very differently by opposing ideological actors.

Our second speaker, Irene Broer is a communication researcher at the Leibniz-Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institute (HBI) in Hamburg. Over the past five years, her work has focused on the interface between science and society, e.g., with regard to new intermediaries in science journalism, obstacles and aids in science policy advice, and the characteristics of science communication during crises. The title of Irenes presentation is “Science communication in flux: New actors in practices at the interface between science and media“. She will present parts of her completed doctoral research, focusing on the impact of digitalization on science communication and the multiple roles of the Science Media Center as an intermediary between science and the media.

Date and time: November 23, at 7pm. The official part of the event normally takes around two hours and will be followed by some informal drinks.

Location: Our next Context Collapse session will take place at a new location. We will meet at the “Reading Room“, 1st floor of The New Institute, Warburgstraße 18 in Hamburg.

Registration: If you want to join this event, please register here. If you cannot attend, but want to be informed about upcoming events in the next months, please join our mailing list!

Call for contributions: Can you see yourself providing a short input as a basis for discussion? The success of the format is dependent on your contributions, and we are looking forward to your thoughts, insights, and perspectives!