Lehrende/r: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Oliver Scheiding
Veranstaltungsart: Hauptseminar
Anzeige im Stundenplan: 05.866.532
Semesterwochenstunden: 2
Credits: 8,0
Unterrichtssprache: Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 30
Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches: In the last two decades, independent magazines have become increasingly visible. They have now established their own digital-based infrastructures for marketing and distribution as well as offline events such as conventions and award ceremonies. Today, indie magazines are generally understood as publications not backed by big publishing houses, operating independently from the constraint to return profits, and thus granting full editorial control to their makers, who often embrace a DIY or DIWO ethics. These publications target a much smaller audience than mainstream magazines, a ‘micro public,’ with very specific shared interests and tastes: Indies may serve as touchstones of subcultures, ‘niches,’ avantgardes, minoritised communities, and undergrounds. They harness the magazine form to potentially reach beyond these readerships and to penetrate the mass market or provide an alternative to, and critique of, commercial titles and their normative pretensions. Independent magazines highlight this opposition to a perceived mainstream as part of their textual and visual identities, using it as a resource to plunder, subvert, or imitate in order to raise awareness about cultural and political issues and to provide aesthetic alternatives. The advanced research seminar addresses examples of contemporary indie publishing, probes a historical instance of periodicals-outside-the-mainstream, and widens the discussion by including indies that find innovative ways of dealing with pressing social and political issues. A reader will be posted on ILIAS at the beginning of the term
