Josef Schmied Boeken

The present volume draws on the experience of the Summer School held in August 2018 in Split, where graduate students and experienced scholars met from Germany, Albania, Serbia, Macedonia, and Croatia. All contributions discuss small-scale empirical research on the threatened ideals mentioned in the title as desirable and achievable parts of their daily lives as members of modern universities and civil societies. The contributions can also serve as a general model for open and critical international and intercultural academic discourse in joint teaching, research and publishing.

The present volume is the productive result of multilateral academic collaboration between institutions of higher education from Germany (Chemnitz), Macedonia (Ohrid, Bitola), Albania (Vlora) and Serbia (Niš). The collaboration, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), was set up to establish a West-East Dialogue and a better understanding and processing of the crises in Europe through the deconstruction and construction of media texts. The contributions in this volume illustrate how ‘crises’ are constructed by the media discursively, with attention paid to the linguistic elements of media texts, and in some cases accompanying images. The authors in this volume are students and established scholars that come from different but intersecting disciplines. They each focus on different ‘crises’ in different (national) media outlets, offering new perspectives on how social, political and geographical events may be shaped by the media, and how these mediatised portrayals may in turn influence public perspectives on a range of issues.