Britta Ohm

This book is essentially an ethnography of television production in a situation of acute change. In late February 2002, when the fieldwork for this thesis commenced, an Express train carrying many Hindu-nationalist activists caught fire outside a small-town station in the West-Indian state of Gujarat. The incident set off the most brutal and most clearly state-sponsored violence against the Muslim minority (more than 2000 dead, 200 000 displaced) in India's post-Independence history. It was the first communal violence that was 24x7 reported nation-wide by commercial television, and it was the first pogrom on a global scale that was covered live and uncensored by competing networks from the same country (rather than international media "uncovering" such a form of organised violence and persecution).
Researched under this impression of mediated real violence, this thesis provides, firstly, an analysis of the interplay of transnational media corporations, particularly Rupert Murdoch's Star TV, in their pursuit of creating profitable national consumer markets, preferably in a democracy like India, with the anti-minority politics, modes of popular/populist mobilisation and discursive strategies of Hindu nationalism. It looks at the economic, technological, medial, political, social, visual/iconographic and legal aspects of this interplay and delineates their concrete manifestations in news as well as in entertainment programming of everyday television (particularly in very popular shows and channels at the time). These aspects are set into the larger framework of globalisation, privatisation, commercialisation and neo-liberal policies, the related thrusts of social upward mobility (especially in the new middle classes), ‘good governance’ (instead of socio-economic justice) and shifting class-, caste-, majority-minority and national-regional relations in the context of a re-formulation of nation and state that defines and legitimises new logics of inclusion and exclusion.
Secondly, this work is a study of "Indianisation" and lingual/representational politics in the context of the growing precariousness of the liberal-secular discourse and of democratic, independent mass media in India. Especially English-language journalists, whose largely critical coverage of the anti-Muslim violence experienced an hitherto unknown rejection on the part of TV audiences (and consequently produced a slump in advertising revenues), turned with the Gujarat crisis out to epitomise the ambivalence of challenging the definitional power of a privileged postcolonial class: its rightful critique carries the danger of vindicating and naturalising anti-minority cultural nationalism. The study follows and examines, before the background of a normative construction of a Hindi-speaking, ‘authentic’ media consumer, the changing position of both English and Hindi-producing journalists and producers, their respective perceptions of alienation, speechlessness and empowerment, their unwanted role as activists in the context of shifting meanings of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity', their difficulties or agility in assessing their options and maintaining, changing or even developing their convictions, and the strategies they find or reject for adapting to the circumstances.
In this context, thirdly, this book engages in a critical debate of anthropological assessments of globalisation and media change and theories of postcolonialism on the one hand and conventional modes of ethnography on the other hand. It attempts to show the 'blind spot' of the mutual linkage between Hindu nationalism and economic liberalisation in the approaches specifically of Arjun Appadurai and the Subaltern Studies Group and argues for a stronger reflection and consideration in anthropological research on the cooperation between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ in terms of disabling and anti-emancipatory mechanisms rather than focussing mainly on aspects of empowerment and negotiation of identity. At the same time it proposes, by introducing an ‘ethnographic moment’ instead of the ‘ethnographic present’, a flexibility in ethnography that is aware of its increasingly ephemeral character and that takes account of the pace of change in the media as well as of the grown likelihood, in a global era of post-traditional wars and genocidal politics, of the field researcher to be confronted with incalculable situations of conflict and violence.

Until 1991, the reporting of communal violence had, in permanent violation of India's democratic constitution, been censored "for the good of the people". This was the case both in the approach adopted by the then single state-owned TV broadcaster Doordarshan, and the result of pretty effective self-censorship in private newspapers. The official argument was that news of riots, and especially the naming of communities, would instigate further violence amongst a population never deemed quite "developed", i.e. secular, democratic and civilised enough. Indeed, that the Gujarat pogrom was the first communal violence in India that was televised, after the liberalisation of the media landscape had set in after 1991, is probably the only fact that goes uncontested. This identification is where even scholarly debate so far still ends. As such, this fact tells us little, though, because it is the very precondition for the prevailing antagonistic interpretations of the event itself.The coming decade, for Muslims to take steps out of their marginalisation, will require to move beyond complaints about stereotypisation and exclusion. It demands a greater understanding of the logic with which discourses evolve and are being organised, of the mechanisms of media and of the fact that "being in the media" may work as much against them as for them. Precisely their precarious position in India equips them for approaching this task.

This article originally appeared in German under the title "Exzellente Entqualifizierung: Das neue akademische Prekariat" in "Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik" (08/2016; https://www.blaetter.de/archiv/jahrgaenge/2016/august/exzellente-entqualifizierungdas-neue-akademische-prekariat) and has been minimally adapted.

"Mit „Exzellenz“-Initiativen strebt die „Bildungsrepublik Deutschland“ an die Weltspitze. Doch hinter den glänzenden Phrasen vollzieht sich die neoliberale Zurichtung der Universität. Britta Ohm, selbst langjährige Lehrende und Forschende, klagt an: Die „Exzellenz“ der deutschen Universitäten basiert auf der Ausbeutung einer ganzen Klasse prekär beschäftigter Akademiker, die am Ende schlicht überflüssig gemacht werden."

Veröffentlichungstitel: "Exzellente Entqualifizierung: Das neue akademische Prekariat"

https://www.blaetter.de/archiv/jahrgaenge/2016/august/exzellente-entqualifizierung-das-neue-akademische-prekariat

This article follows a comparative perspective on media narratives and practices pertaining to India's new Prime Minister Narendra Modi, previously Chief Minister of the Indian State of Gujarat since 2002, and Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been in government, first as Prime Minister and now as President, since 2002. I argue that both have attained a current position of nearly opposition-free leadership by buttressing a “people's unity” as a majority of those who believe in the reliability of particular information. Modi has achieved this by successfully avoiding, since the mass-mediated anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat 2002, journalistic and legal investigation into his actions, thereby supporting people's interpretation and their confidence into their own capacity to identify “truth”. Modi's thus generated democratic intangibility becomes obvious when comparing it to Erdoğan who, by contrast, is more vulnerable to democratic opposition because he claims active legal and moral guidance to his supporters against a historically adversarial nationalist-secular media system and critical information about himself. 

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in India's television landscape, this article works with two terms – “interpretational authority” and “star-anchor” – so as to elucidate the ambivalence of empowerment in what Arvind Rajagopal has called India's postcolonial 'split public'. I understand interpretational authority, in the ambiguous context of the “democratic nation-state”, as professional journalism's filtering function of both direct democracy and popular majoritarianism. Along four genealogical variants of empowerment, I relate democratisation and anti-elitism in and through evolving Indian news television to Walter Benjamin's deliberations on the aesthetics of fascist communication and argue that in a swiftly 'entertainmentized' TV journalism, interpretational authority was rendered somewhat dysfunctional before it could actually establish itself both in vernacular and English-language channels. The “star-anchor”, in order to still reach a public, becomes the embodiment of interpretational authority compromised by a reified, socio-economic hierarchisation and the immediacy of fascist stardom.

This article introduces the term 'the ethnographic moment', which takes up and 'plays' with the long-disputed 'ethnographic present' in anthropology, as an indicator of changing conditions and requirements for ethnography in the context of mass media and mediation. It argues that event and debate, rather than structure and practice, have become pivotal aspects in thinking and conducting fieldwork that has to deal with the ephemeral. At the same time, it tries to show that an unquestioning acceptance of technological advancement and speed of societal change immunizes us to the thinkable absence of media and obscures analysis of lasting states of injustice and inequality in whose (re-) production they have a stake.

Keywords: anthropology, media contents, social change, technology, time

https://www.westminsterpapers.org/25/volume/9/issue/3/

"In this context, “Gezi”, as a synonym for all the places in Turkey where protests and citizen forums have sprung up, is not as much about solidarity as it is about the albeit tentative discovery of common-ness through the very defence of the commons."

This article questions the assumption that the increase in visibility of religion in mass-mediated content is indicative of greater impact of religion in the public and state sphere and of a process of de-secularization. It argues that expressions of Hinduism and Islam have become inseparable from secularist histories in the respective countries. The analysis emphasizes a necessary distinction between piety, public popular culture and political activism in the name of a national religious majority, and shows that in its appropriation and redefinition of secularism and employment of religious symbolism, Hindu nationalist mobilization and governance in India are related more closely to sacralization of secularism in historical Turkish nationalism than to the Islamic movement. In both countries, we can observe a retreat rather than a greater media presence of the pious and sacred in the face of neonationalism and commercialization, which in each case produces a democratically precarious public popular culture.

The article is in German and will be published in the 'Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik' (Papers for German and International Politics) in August 2016. I will provide an English translation if the English title attracts enough interest - so this is in fact kind of a test run :).
The article critically and in global perspective elaborates on the intrinsic linkages between the fixation on the professorship as the single permanent post in the German university system, the tragic fallouts of the state-initiated program of scientific excellence, and the refusal to pay salaries to university teachers. It argues that the thwarting of solidarity and unionism amongst scholars, the discouragement of unpredictable (open, 'risky') research (especially in the arts, humanities and social sciences) and the eventual enforced de-qualification of mass produced underemployed academics have become the indispensable and unconstitutional underbelly of the German government's rhetoric of the 'international battle for the best brains'. It is because academia is under attack on a global scale - for different reasons in different contexts - that the advertising machinery of the the German government is able to sell a sorry state for a viable option.

Die Beschäftigten an Hochschulen und Forschungseinrichtungen leiden seit Jahren unter einer hohen Befristungsquote, die zudem stark dysfunktional ist. Der dauerhafte Einstieg des Bundes in die Hochschulfinanzierung muss genutzt werden, um endlich mehr Dauerstellen zu schaffen. Das Argument von Ländern und Hochschulen, dass die nur zeitlich begrenzt zur Verfügung stehenden Programmmittel dies verhinderten, ist nun nicht mehr stichhaltig. Zudem ruft die Situation nach einem Neuanfang: Die rasant gewachsenen Studierendenzahlen sind nicht sinnvoll durch immer neue prekäre Projektstellen und Nachwuchs ohne Perspektive zu bewältigen. Die Studierenden brauchen erfahrenes, dauerhaft an den Hochschulen tätiges Personal – und junge Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler brauchen vertretbare Berufsperspektiven. Wir fordern daher:

Vollständige Verwendung der Hochschulpaktmittel für Dauerstellen!
http://frististfrust.net/?fbclid=IwAR0eBird8C9siwdALxOBwL_8TKjIigIknBMDYqG30HZFDEI4WZO6FjSkk1w

Zeichnet die Petition hier (ab 01. März 2019):
https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/frist-ist-frust-entfristungspakt-2019