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MediaFutures Seminar: Chatting Communities into Existence: Local Chat Groups as Emerging Civic Infrastructures with Emilija Gagrčin from the University of Mannheim
28 April, 2023 @ 12:00 - 13:00
Emilija Gagrčin from the University of Mannheim will give a seminar on April 28th
TITLE: Chatting Communities into Existence: Local Chat Groups as Emerging Civic Infrastructures
WHEN: 28 April, 12:00 – 13:00
ABSTRACT:
This presentation explores the civic potential of messenger groups. It zooms into the everyday communication in local chat groups, focusing on the case study of building chat groups in urban neighborhoods from a comparative perspective. Drawing on interviews with building chat group members in Israel and Germany, we investigate how building communities are co-constructed between platform affordances and user practices, and how civic norms are negotiated between online and offline communication spaces. We map the uses, gratifications, and constraints of the chat groups and their relations with the spatial organization, informational flows, and socio-political environment in each community.
BIO:
Dr. Emilija Gagrčin is a research associate at the University of Mannheim and affiliated with the ERC project PREPARE at the University of Bergen.
Her research focus is on political media use. In particular, she is interested in social, normative, and infrastructural aspects of digital political communication, such as on social media and messenger apps. She focuses on norms and competencies necessary for a democratic coexistence in networked societies.
Dr. Emilija Gagrčin is affiliated with the Digital Political Inequality Lab at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the Weizenbaum Panel research group at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin. She is also a representative of Early-Career Scholars in the management team of the Political Communication Section of the European Communication Research and Education Conference (ECREA).
Organizer
This seminar is a collaboration between MediaFutures and the ERC project PREPARE.