Queue-munity engagement: Collaborative Event Ethnography at the Antiques Roadshow in Kent

Using Collaborative Event Ethnography as a research method, a team of 21 researchers conducted fieldwork at the Antiques Roadshow in Ightham Mote, Kent. This article reflects on the experience of queuing at the event and how it was experienced and discussed by researchers and participants. Drawing upon Mol, the article approaches the practice of queuing as involving an inherent multiplicity of often contradictory experiences through which idealised, Second World War-related understandings of British queuing practice are simultaneously confirmed and challenged. Through multiple participants viewing the queue from within and outside we were able to capture the processes of community-building, curation, management, rule-maintenance and rule-bending within the social life of the queue. In demonstrating this multiplicity Collaborative Event Ethnography is shown to be an excellent research tool for capturing short-term, large-scale events while also highlighting the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of social interactions and social norms within queues

"How to be a (un)successful populist" - eine Analyse populistischer Kommunikationsstrategien via Twitter

Der Wind des Populismus weht schon längst und kaum ein westliches Land ist gegenwärtig nicht davon geprägt. Die Entwicklung des Phänomens Populismus ist in den letzten Jahren Gegenstand einer intensiven akademischen Auseinandersetzung geworden. Die Anzahl an Theorien und Ansätze, welche von verschiedenen Perspektiven ausgehend versuchen diesen Begriff zu erläutern, sind rasant gestiegen. Die politische Kommunikation ist zunehmend geprägt von einem hohen Grad an Emotionalisierung, Einsatz populistischer Rhetorik und Verwendung von Social Media-Kanälen. Die Unzufriedenheit der Bürger nährt den Boden vieler Demagogen. Derartige gesellschaftliche und politische Entwicklungen zu analysieren und die damit einhergehenden Auswirkungen auf die politischen Prozesse und Demokratie begreifbar zu machen, scheinen heutzutage unabdingbar. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, die politischen Kommunikationsstrategien von Thierry Baudet, Geert Wilders, H.C. Strache und Sebastian Kurz zu analysieren und festzustellen, inwiefern die populistische Rhetorik zum Ausdruck gebracht wird. Ähneln oder unterscheiden sich die populistischen Kommunikationsstrategien voneinander? Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit sollen neue Erkenntnisse in Bezug auf dem Einsatz populistischer Rhetorik und charakteristischer Merkmale des populistischen Kommunikationsstils via Twitter in der politischen Kommunikation in Österreich und in den Niederlanden gewonnen werden.In the last couple of decades populism has evolved to a ubiquitous political movement, reforming the political communication completely. Extensive research shows the relevance of understanding this new political trend that threatens to destroy democratic values. The political events in the last couple of years are not only alarming, but also show the consequences of populist movements. It has been argued that there is a difference between populist rhetoric and populist communication style. This research provides a link between four different populist political actors and aims at providing new findings with regard to the communication strategies employed in their communication on Twitter. In doing so, this thesis if focusing on analyzing two Austrian and two Dutch political actors, well known for having populist attitudes, namely Sebastian Kurz, H.C. Strache, Geert Wilders and Thierry Baudet. Due to major changes in the current media environment, social media channels prove to facilitate the bound between populist actors and their electorate. This study intends to illustrate the connection between social media communication and populist ideology and the methods employed in the political communication

Folklore Music on Romanian TV: From State Socialist Television to Private Channels

This article explores specific televised folklore performances of muzică populară in Romania as ‘media rituals.’ I argue that this particular kind of folklore performance can be analysed as television genre. The article follows different articulations of this genre from its televised appearances on the public television channel in the last decades of the communist period to the post-1989 niche television stations specialised in folklore. The changes in the form of the genre, and the negotiations of value and authenticity that take place through the televised performances reveal the role of television in disseminating a social poetics of the nation state

A Stitch in Time: Searching for Authenticity through Shifting Regimes of Value in Romania

This thesis deals with the role that material culture plays in the production of value and meaning through discourses of authenticity. It also follows how folk objects are mobilized in national ideologies, transmissions of personal and family memory, museological discourses and artistic acts. My research is centred around a collection of Romanian artefacts which travelled from Romania to the Horniman Museum in London in 1956. The project that I undertook was devised as a collaborative research project between Goldsmiths College and the Horniman Museum, in which two PhD researchers carried out a recontextualization of this collection. The objects had been collected from villages and other sources in the 1950s (a context of political and social change in Romania), then assembled into a collection and sent over to the Horniman Museum. My side of the project sought to bring out historical trajectories and the social life of material culture in the villages where the Horniman objects originated, and beyond. The objects on which my research focused, which I considered to be the counterparts of the ones stored at the Horniman, revealed a complex usage of the folk idiom and of material culture in Romania, expressed through debates around value, authenticity and history. My thesis is firstly concerned with the movement of things between different regimes of value, mapping out a network of spaces of cultural production where the folk idiom is relevant in Romania. The people I involved in my research continuously pointed out that the truly valuable thing I was seeking – the ‘authentic’ object – was to be found elsewhere. This promise of an ‘elsewhere’ has kept pushing my research further along: from one village to another; from village houses to the houses of culture, and then to museums; and from live folk performances to national television. The other concern of this thesis is with the places and moments where the circulation of objects is halted because their value is put into question. In the process, I reveal how people deal with the absence of what they define as ‘authentic’ objects. They either identify this absence as loss, and sometimes explain it through historical narratives and memories; at other times they alleviate it through performance. These different strategies entail different relationships with material culture, which I conceptualize as relationships between subject and object