Conspiracy – surveillance

Professor Boonen, Dr Derya Gür-Şeker (Department of German Studies/Linguistics) and Michael Wentker M.A. (Department of Anglophone Studies/Linguistics) are jointly working on an article about memes and their form and function in the discourse of conspiracy theories. It will be published in the compendium ‘Conspiracy Discourse’ (ed.: Ruth Breeze, Massimiliano Demata et al.). A funding application for further research into conspiracy discourse has been submitted.

How has the media shift over the past decades transformed surveillance? How has it been internalised in terms of self-surveillance, self-control and self-optimisation? These are the questions addressed by the project ‘Literatur und Überwachung’ (Dr Liane Schüller/Professor Werner Jung), which incorporates approaches from literary studies, cultural studies and media studies. It explores whether and how we can trace a shift in the media of surveillance. Of course, the media that are used to exert control provoke different narratives and depictions at different points of history. The researchers set out to investigate whether the media shift in the surveillance technologies, then, gives rise to a media shift or a shift in the utilisation of media in the arts.