Welcome to the Chair of Visual and Media Anthropology
Infrastructurally, the Chair of Visual and Media Anthropology is based at the Karl Jaspers Centre for Transcultural Studies and bridges across to the Institute of Ethnology and the Department of Anthropology at the South Asia Institute. It is part of a cluster of four professorships in cultural and social anthropology, on the one hand, and of
a collaborative of five professors holding different chairs, on the other hand; all of which are situated at the Karl Jaspers Centre, feeding into and running the international Master of Transcultural Studies. In terms of research and teaching focus, the department of Visual and Media Anthropology has a variety of foci, ranging from popular visual culture to film industries, curatorial strategies and contemporary art practices and markets, from urbanization processes to transnational migration (see the film portrait). Images and media have been mediators and sources of transcultural encounters and entanglements for a long time and across national borders, and play an increasingly important role in today's globalised worlds. Because various agents, institutions and objects, all contributing to the globalised imaginaries, have drawn upon different media for their legitimacy and other forms of power, we aspire to offer new insights and provide a solid body of theoretical and methodological tools to our students, to grapple with the challenges of transculturation in and through visual and media cultures. The chair hosts a broad spectrum of research based projects and teaching with respect to visual and audio-visual materials, e.g. advertising and gender; ethnographic and documentary film; urban youth culture, lifestyle and emotions or the global flow of 'local' art markets. Dr. Christiane Brosius holds the Chair of Visual and Media Anthropology since 2009. The rest of the team are: Dr. Cathrine Bublatzky, Dr. des. Laila Abu-Er-Rub, Dr. Roos Gerritsen, Ina Buchholz-Chebbi and Nina Petrovic.
