This section gives insight into our research by offering short analyses on selected videos and their poetic and rhetorical strategies.
In Through the Eyes of a Refugee Amnesty International uses hypnosis in an experiment sending five participants on a dramatic journey from the war zone of Syria to safety in the Netherlands. What happens when you let ordinary people live out the experiences of a refugee? The [...]
A young woman shares her experience of domestic violence on YouTube using the popular ‘One Photo a Day’ format. However, the video only gradually reveals that this is what it is about. 2012 is the worst year in a young woman’s life. Every day she takes a [...]
The right-wing extremist activist Nikolai Nerling – known as ‘The People’s Teacher’ (‘Der Volkslehrer’) and meanwhile legally barred from the teaching profession – attends a Fridays for Future demo to portray himself as a victim and stir up opinion against the climate protection movement. The video is paradigmatic for attempts by right-wing extremists to [...]
In order to draw attention to the ongoing problem of everyday sexism, the United Nations organisation UN Women is portraying the online search engine Google as an objective guarantor of truth. The reactions are divided. Produced by the agency ‘Memac Oglivy & Mather Dubai’ and released in [...]
Greenpeace activists try to prevent the dumping of nuclear waste in the Atlantic Ocean – and meet with resistance and scorn. Only years later does the campaign succeed. With dozens of barrels of nuclear waste on board, the freighter Gem, chartered by the British Atomic Energy Agency [...]
With its video The DNA Journey, which has been viewed more than 17 million times, the flight comparison site Momondo landed a widely noticed and controversial viral hit in the summer of 2016. Produced in cooperation with the family research platform AncestryDNA and published on various video [...]
In 2015, the right-wing conservative weekly Junge Freiheit took the debate about the school curriculum plans of the Baden-Württemberg Red-Green (Social Democrat and Green Party) coalition government as an opportunity to launch a campaign against the so-called ‘ideology of gender mainstreaming’. Just as Junge Freiheit is part [...]
Shortly before the US presidential elections in 2016, the conservative lobby organisation Secure America Now invited you to take part in an imaginary journey into the horror vision of an ‘Islamised Germany’. At the end of 2016, the video Welcome to the Islamic State of Germany sent [...]
Using apparently subversive strategies, the video campaign of the ‘Refugees Welcome’ initiative confronts viewers of xenophobic videos with opposing perspectives and thus calls for more tolerance – albeit with dubious success. During the peak phase of the so-called ‘European refugee crisis’, the ‘Flüchtlinge Willkommen’ (‘Refugees Welcome’) initiative, [...]
The video of little Omran, a Syrian boy who received medical care following a bomb attack in Aleppo, became an international media symbol by showing the suffering of the Syrian people during the raging civil war. […]
