DiML
Doing Diversity and Promoting Critical Media Literacy at the Borders of Law
The Center for Diversity, Media, and Law (DiML) at the University of Giessen explicates how diversity interacts with media and cultural-legal norms. The Center’s focus on diversity creates a new home for gender and sexuality research at the University of Giessen. Yet the Center understands these topics to be indivisible from identity factors such as race, nationality and migration status, class, religion, and ability, all of which have to be conceptualized through an intersectional lens. Diversity is understood as a set of practices concerning the acceptance of differences between persons and groups and the promotion of pluralistic values. Diversity can never be taken as a given but results out of conflictual social and political processes that have to be continuously negotiated. The critical questioning of cultural-legal norms through informed media interactions is at the core of the Center’s mission to examine and support such practices.
The Center for Diversity, Media, and Law (DiML) picks up on the earlier Center for Media and Interactivity’s (Zentrum für Medien und Interaktivität, 2001 – 2024) more than twenty-year history of promoting research on human interactions with digital and analog media, including understanding media skills as cultural techniques and investigating digital habitus. The Center aims to foster research and academic activities that raise awareness of the embeddedness of power relations in digital media technologies, legal settings, and other cultural domains.
The Center’s Objectives are:
I. Doing Diversity with Historical Awareness in Order to Support Difference
The Center seeks to define “diversity,” understood intersectionally, and to support difference and inclusion. The Center’s research identifies barriers to achieving greater diversity such as color-blind racism, colonial knowledge structures, and symbolic versus performative practices of inclusion (Sara Ahmed 2012; Marzia Milazzo 2022). The Center investigates measures to further anti-discrimination in the face of rising hate crimes, anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric, anti-feminism, anti-Muslim racism and anti-Semitism in Germany and elsewhere.
II. Promoting Critical Media Literacy
The Center investigates media within the framework of critical media literacy (Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share 2007). Placing particular emphasis on digital media’s role in addressing issues of social inequality, the Center seeks to provide users with the critical skills necessary to participate in transforming these conditions. The critical media literacy approach brings critical and intersectional media analysis and transformative action to education.
III. Transversing the Borders of Law
The Center works to clarify how lived law (Eugen Ehrlich 1913), jurisdiction (Regina Kreide 2009, 2011), legality (Greta Olson 2022), and a felt sense of law and justice in Rechtsgefühl (Rudolph von Jhering 1872) interact to create subjective legal identities and to influence political processes. The Center investigates the affective impacts of cultural-legal issues and explores how their affective impacts are mediated through popular media exchanges.
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