Welcome to the department of Language and Media Studies!

In the department we research language and media as social and cultural forms in their concrete media and social environments. We ask how cultural transformations change language and media and, conversely, how language and media produce forms of feeling, perception, thinking and community formation. We investigate how linguistic and media practices produce concepts of history and society, and how this connects with processes of community building and feelings of belonging.

Our focus is on the precise analysis of linguistic and media forms of expression and formats and covers a broad range of topics and phenomena including:
Connections between language, culture and society in discourse and interaction, especially in the context of technology, mediality and digitality. Here we deal with questions about the role of language and communication in the digital transformation of society, how language and communication change in the course of digitality and mediatisation.
Relationships between language, society, migration, and technology, in particular how digital cultures (re)shape linguistic norms and community definitions. We  explore how multilingualism influences identity and social dynamics, critically analyse media representations and the role of language in social inclusion and exclusion practices.
The entanglement of the multimodality of speech with the multimodality of audiovisual media. We bring together linguistic and media-aesthetic approaches to analyse language, gesture and audiovisual images. We are interested in understanding the dynamics of meaning-making, its grounding in embodied experience, the interaffectivity of multimodal communication and
Popular cultural phenomena, such as movies, television series and video games. We assume that their close analysis can help us to understand the longings and fears, hopes, dreams and needs of communities of viewers and players of video games. In this sense, popular culture research can serve as an instrument for analysing culture and diagnosing the times and contribute to sharpening our view of a present that, marked by global crises and conflicts, inspires apocalyptic doomsday scenarios as well as transhumanist visions of the future and ecocritical utopias.

“It was never about what the German people actually need”—Audiovisual and Verbal-Gestural Storytelling: A Case Study of Right-Wing Extremism on TikTok
(Paul Jonas Kern, Multimodaly - Discourse - Media (M.A.), winter semester 2024/2025, supervising profesor: Prof. Dr. Cornelia Müller)

„Hasi, Schnucki, Mausebär“ – Über die Verwendung von Kosenamen in romantischen Beziehungen
(Nora Gail, Master Study program, summer semester 2024, supervising profesor: Prof. Dr. Britta Schneider)

„Zur Rhetorik von medial vermittelten feierlichen Ansprachen: eine sprachwissenschaftliche Studie zu den Neujahrsansprachen 2022 von Präsident Wolodymyr Selenskyj und Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz“
(Mariia Shykova, Sprache – Medien – Gesellschaft (M.A.), summer term 2024, supervising profesor: Prof. Dr. Nicole Richter)