Weitere Forschungsvorhaben / Further Research Projects
Nikita Tumanov, PhD project "Collective Memory Reproduction in Social Media: The Image of World War II for the Russian-speaking Community in Germany"
This project addresses the issue of the potentially peculiar and diverse collective WWII memory structure, which is being reproduced via memory practices in the transnational online social media. In particular, it focuses on the World War II /Great Patriotic War images, which are proven to be a compelling marker of political, national, and other identities in Central and Eastern Europe. Representatives of the Russian-speaking community in Germany might be considered as transnational agents that commence online interactions and perform commemorative practices of both ‘host’ and ‘home’ countries. The project poses the following questions: How the images of World War II represented in everyday online social media practices of Russian-speaking users in Germany? How internalized are these images, what are the mechanisms of its agency in framing social reality (e.g. current news, events, personalities, past, present, and future)? How integrated are the views on World War II into the process of political cluster division? Do they aggravate certain political polarization of transnational Russian-speaking clusters in social media?
To answer these inquiries, two waives of social media content analysis, a series of qualitative interviews, and social network analysis will be performed. The research will adopt the logic of micro-sociological theories suchlike Randall Collins’s interaction ritual chains, Rogers Brubaker’s notion of groupness. Focus on social media content and precise online practices may reveal the situational attribution of group orientations among the Russian-speaking users in Germany. To evaluate the trajectories of the cluster and building processes, the terms of social network analysis will be applied.
The project does not pursue the goal of having population-representative findings due to the enormous quantity and diversity of Russian-speaking social media users residing in Germany. The focal point of the research is to capture the patterns of community diversification and potential creation of ‘filter bubbles’ among Russian-speaking users based on the attitudes towards WWII.