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Andreas Hepp

Title of the presentation:
Political Discourse Cultures in Europe

Short abstract of the presentation:
With regard to a debate on national as well as transnational political public spheres, Bernhard Peters assented that “public spheres […] have a social and cultural foundation that does not consist of media markets and media organizations alone” (Peters 2007: 363). We take these considerations as starting point and raise the question of how to conceptualise that socio-cultural foundation, a concept of 'political discourse cultures' can be an appropriate starting point, especially for explaining political public spheres in Europe: On the one hand, we can observe an ongoing transnationalization of public spheres, in the sense of a shared monitoring of EU politics in Brussels, while on the other hand, national public spheres persist and nations continue to have a segmenting effect on the emerging European public sphere, albeit to a variable extent. The concept of political discourse culture enables us to explain this complex and contradictory process, by relating the communicative space of the public sphere to (long-term) processes of cultural change. We thus extend our focus beyond the mere production structures underlying the public sphere, i.e. the social network composed of institutions, professions, milieus, and individuals, who are the producers and carriers of public communication, to encompass cultural dispositions that manifest themselves in public political communications – in short: we focus on political discourse cultures. The structural and cultural aspects of public political communication are certainly intricately interwoven. However, their analytical separation should serve the purpose of a more precise cartography of the public sphere’s underlying foundation.

Short biography:
Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the Faculty for Cultural Studies at the University of Bremen. In this capacity, he has inspired a new research focus on media cultures, and co-founded the Institute of Media, Communications and Information (IMKI) in 2005. Since then he is involved in numerous research projects, beside other on the transnationalization of public spheres in Europe. Andreas Hepp is author of four, co-author of two books, co-editor of nine books and has written more than 90 articles and chapters in different academic journals and books.