Papers by Yiannis Mylonas
The proposed volume wishes to bring together studies focusing on the Greek realities of class as ... more The proposed volume wishes to bring together studies focusing on the Greek realities of class as they appear in and through the Greek media realm. We are interested in exploring the different class cultures that unfold in today’s Greece, by examining the meanings, the performances, and the social relations that underpin/co-articulate the “making” of class through various media practices in the specific country.
📺The proposed volume welcomes contributions on class-related perspectives regarding Greek media consumption practices and everyday media use (in both “old” and “new” media), media representations of class-related topics, as well as political economy analyses connected with questions of class politics and ownership of media conglomerates in the Greek media realm, and issues related to class dimensions connected with algorithmic biases in the Greek cybersphere.
✏️For more information, please check our extended Call for Contributions.
Call for contributions: “Media and Class in Greece” – Proposed edited volume | discourseanalysis
Nordicom Review, 2021
This article focuses on the ways in which the Danish liberal mainstream press covered events rela... more This article focuses on the ways in which the Danish liberal mainstream press covered events related to the so-called Greek crisis. In particular, we examine the coverage of the different Greek national elections that took place during the Greek crisis years (2010-2019) by Jyllands-Posten (JP), a popular Danish daily newspaper. Qualitative content analysis is deployed to study a corpus of 70 news and editorial articles published by JP on the aforementioned topic. Our analysis highlights the existence of three main interrelated themes in JP's constructions of the Greek elections: a moralist, a culturalist, and a technocratic/ anti-leftist theme. These themes are theorised through the use of relevant theory on class cultures and politics today.
Stasis, 2021
This article focuses on New Democracy (ND), Greece's main conservative party, and its return to p... more This article focuses on New Democracy (ND), Greece's main conservative party, and its return to power in 2019. The study enquires into ND's hegemonic strategy and governing practice. ND's hegemonic strategy is grounded in both neoliberal and Far-Right premises. This enabled ND to create a hegemonic block that ranges from centrist liberals to far-rightists, while advancing an anti-leftist ideological project, connected to progressing upper-class interests. The ND administration unfolds an autocratic form of executive governance that is based on legislating class-related 182 Yiannis Mylonas reforms, propaganda and effective control of the mainstream media, and coercive force. These features reflect the development of neoliberal authoritarianism in Greece. They represent "the new form of bourgeois republic in the current phase of capitalism," bearing the traits of autocracy, illiberalism, and Far-Right mainstreaming. The study deploys examples from ND's political discourse and from policies that the ND administration has launched.
Media.Communication.Design, 2020
Yiannis Mylonas interviewed Nico Carpentier in June 2019, at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Ar... more Yiannis Mylonas interviewed Nico Carpentier in June 2019, at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art of Moscow, during his visit to HSE-NRU.
Communications. Media. Design., 2019
Since the early years of the debt crisis in 2010, a large part of liberal intellectuals and publi... more Since the early years of the debt crisis in 2010, a large part of liberal intellectuals and public commentators in Greece has argued for an interpretative framework with the notion of ‘national identity’ as the root of all troubles. Their narrative presents the crisis as an opportunity for Greeks to rediscover themselves and acquire a more ‘Western’ and market-friendly outlook while austerity is realized. Here, the crisis is read as an outcome of a ‘deviant culture’ that now has the opportunity to recover. In this article we focus on how thуe discourse of media personas who are ‘non-political actors’ -a philosophers and a marketing gurus- popularized this framework especially between the years 2010 to 2012. We argue that these discourses, working to shape new social identities of flexibility, mobility and competition, compatible with the requirements of neoliberalism to overcome the crisis, work more effectively when voiced by supposedly ‘neutral’ agents.
Since the early years of the debt crisis in 2010, a large part of liberal intellectuals and comme... more Since the early years of the debt crisis in 2010, a large part of liberal intellectuals and commentators in Greece has argued for an interpretative framework with the notion of 'national identity' as the root of all troubles. Their narrative presents the crisis as an opportunity for Greeks to rediscover themselves and acquire a more 'Western' and market-friendly outlook while austerity is realized. Here, the crisis is read as an outcome of a 'deviant culture' that now has the opportunity to recover. In this article we focus on how the discourse of media personas who are 'non-political actors' -a philosopher and a marketing guru-popularized this framework especially between the years 2010 to 2012.
The purpose of this article is to study the articulations and uses of the terms and idea of the E... more The purpose of this article is to study the articulations and uses of the terms and idea of the Enlightenment by Greek, self-proclaimed ‘liberal’ pundits. The research draws on relevant articles published at two popular news/lifestyle websites, 'AthensVoice' and 'Protagon' during the years of the so-called 'Greek crisis'. I argue that the 'Enlightenment' is a nodal signifier of disciplinary discourses, where Greece's economic/social/political crises are viewed as mere symptoms that underline Greece’s fundamental crisis, which is the country's ‘lack of 'Enlightenment’. Critical discourse analysis informed by discourse theory is deployed to analyze such discursive constructions. The article concludes that such discourses are connected to the mainstream crisis/austerity rationales (as articulated by policymakers and pundits), sharing a non-systemic, culturalist/psychological understanding of the crisis’ roots and advancing neoliberal rationales and policies to resolve the crisis in Greece and elsewhere. Post-colonial theory is also is deployed to explain the accounts of the Greek liberals and their relation to the Enlightenment idea and their uses of it, among other bourgeois vantage points of exclusionary and disciplinary discourses and practices.
Peer reviewed articles by Yiannis Mylonas
Theory and Event, 2024
This study focuses on contemporary cultural projects
dealing with the Greek revolutionary event o... more This study focuses on contemporary cultural projects
dealing with the Greek revolutionary event of the 1940s.
Empirically, the study examines a growing corpus of different cultural
practices dealing with aspects of the Greek 1940s. These cultural
practices are viewed as counter-archives and conceptualized
using the notion of the proletarian public sphere associated with
counter-hegemonic legacies, discourses, narratives, and practices
situated in today’s Greek political antagonisms. The past is understood
to haunt the present in instances when the constitutive violence
of hegemonic discourses and institutions unfolds. The projects
studied create public presences of subjects and circumstances
repressed by the official Greek public sphere. This signifies a production
of knowledge from below, beyond what official knowledge
regimes foreground and exclude. The projects unfold utopian margins,
pointing towards the existence of a living social memory of
emancipatory and revolutionary struggles that remain incomplete.
Filmicon, 2019
Produced and screened in 2017, Pantelis Voulgaris's To teleftaio simeioma/The Last Note reconstru... more Produced and screened in 2017, Pantelis Voulgaris's To teleftaio simeioma/The Last Note reconstructs the story of the massacre of two hundred imprisoned Communists, in retaliation for the execution of four Nazis by the Greek Resistance, in 1944. The analysis proposes a political reading of the film, as it deals with the collective trauma of the Occupation, and the heroic acts of the Leftist Resistance. The Last Note may be seen to produce what according to the historian Enzo Traverso (2017) can be called a "melancholic topos", concerning the making of a symbolic locus, which reserves and revives an emancipatory horizon for the politics to come. In the midst of a prolonged and ongoing social, political and economic crisis that Greece and potentially the whole world is at, grand narratives of struggle, collectivity and emancipation may contribute towards the generation of politics that can overcome the political impasse that contemporary societies are experiencing.
Σύγχρονα Θέματα, 2020
(Το άρθρο δημοσιεύτηκε στα Σύγχρονα Θέματα, Τεύχος 147-148, Οκτώβριος – Απρίλιος 2020).
Το άρθρ... more (Το άρθρο δημοσιεύτηκε στα Σύγχρονα Θέματα, Τεύχος 147-148, Οκτώβριος – Απρίλιος 2020).
Το άρθρο αυτό εστιάζει στη μελέτη των αναπαραστάσεων της ελληνικής κρίσης στον Τύπο της Γερμανίας και της Δανίας. Σχετικές μελέτες έχουν δείξει ότι τα Μέσα Μαζικής Ενημέρωσης βασίστηκαν σε μεγάλο βαθμό στην επίσημη εκδοχή της κρίσης, όπως αυτή διατυπώθηκε από Ευρωπαίους πολιτικούς ηγέτες, καθώς κι από επιφανείς τεχνοκράτες και οικονομολόγους. Η ανάλυση δείχνει ότι ο Λόγος (discourse) της κρίσης στα ΜΜΕ εκφράζεται με μετα-πολιτικούς όρους, πλαισιώνοντας την ελληνική κρίση με πολιτισμικά, ηθικιστικά και τεχνοκρατικά επιχειρήματα.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019
This article draws attention to one of the neglected aspects of trolling in current literature: i... more This article draws attention to one of the neglected aspects of trolling in current literature: its potential to stand as a form of cultural politics that may inform counter-hegemonic challenges to prevalent ideologies. Rather than merely perceiving trolling as a threat to normality or a proof of the internet’s dystopic character, we look at the ways that certain trolls employ the method of ‘subversive affirmation’ for effectively addressing current events, and to mock hegemonic ideological currents, lifestyles and contexts in Greece today. We argue that the trolls we study are positioned against the hegemonic neoliberal framework and its attempts to achieve consensus on the supposed necessity of austerity reforms and the maintenance of the euro currency, as well as against a prevailing conservativism and nationalism that blend with the broader neoliberal assemblage of discourses, policies and practices in Greek society. By developing a thematic analysis on selected Facebook trolls’ posts, we discuss the ways that trolls function politically, transgressing the limits of the hegemonic discourses and identities, as well as the norms of mediated dialogue, deliberation and critique. The key mechanisms deployed by the trolls are the overlapping practices of over-identification and humour. This article suggests seeing trolling as a form of cultural production that not only damages, but redirects desires, produces identifications and instils passionate investments in political ideologies.
The hegemonic framing of the ‘Greek crisis’, launched by leading liberal and conservative politic... more The hegemonic framing of the ‘Greek crisis’, launched by leading liberal and conservative politicians in the European Union (EU) and elsewhere and followed by mass media, reflected deep Western racial prejudices towards the periphery, and stressed typical bourgeois values affirming hard work, while publicly asserting regimes of entitlement to citizenship, welfare and consumption. The article presents a class-oriented analysis of the ‘Greek crisis’ discursive construction in North-Western European media, by studying articles published between 2010 and 2015 in four newspapers from Germany and Denmark. The analysis shows that, along with cultural ones, upper/middle-class biases are publicly expressed through articulations of ridicule, contempt and resentment, three interrelated ‘affective modalities’ connected to essentialist binary constructions of the (Western/European) self and the (non-Western/European) Other. Thus, the bourgeois ideology is crucial in reproducing depoliticized frames of economic crisis, to pursue neoliberal crisis-reforms (such as various regimes of austerity and labour deregulation). The production and affirmation of middle-class subjectivities, is crucial for the organic advance of neoliberal reforms in society, while denying the advancing of working – class identifications and solidarities in the highly uncertain times of today.
This article presents a critical analysis of the Danish press coverage of the referendum called b... more This article presents a critical analysis of the Danish press coverage of the referendum called by the Left-led coalition government of Greece in July 2015, concerning the future of austerity policies. It focuses on the conservative daily press of Denmark, one of the ‘core’ EU countries, writing on developments in the periphery. Three main themes emerge in the study’s discourse analysis of Berlingske Tidende’s and Jyllands Posten’s coverage: ‘post-democratic realism’, ‘the upper-class gaze’, and ‘Orientalism and cultural racism’. The authors not only reveal the one-sided, elitist coverage by the rightwing papers at Europe’s centre but also point out how the principles of neoliberalism itself and the acceptance of austerity are being constantly reinforced by the media in a country like Denmark, which had previously been marked out for its more progressive welfare capitalism. Denmark’s turn to the Right (and to racism) alongside its biased coverage of the ‘Greferendum’ are examined here in the context of the way in which neoliberalism and its politico-social effects are now presented as both common sense and the only way forward.
This article critically studies documentaries focusing on the "Islamic terrorist threat", produce... more This article critically studies documentaries focusing on the "Islamic terrorist threat", produced in the US and in Western Europe. The particular films relate to the discourses of the growing far right political movements in liberal democracies. The article analyzes the communicational tactics deployed by the filmmakers for counter-terrorist mobilization of "Westerners". The films' producers objectify the terrorist threat as exceptional and ontological, in order to reconfigure the identity of the "West". The analysis focuses on representations of the West's threatening Other through the reflexive use of critical discourse analysis and post structuralist, discourse theory. Counter-threat strategies, varying from warfare to biopolitical control, are articulated as social demands and as individualized tasks of inclusion to the ideological space of the West and the sovereign space of western nation states. The critical study of the particular documentaries aims at highlighting the regressive and character of the passionate discourses of far right media, in relation to the political crisis that liberal democracies across the world are facing.
This study presents a scrutiny of ‘liberal’ discursive constructions of the ‘Enlightenment’ in th... more This study presents a scrutiny of ‘liberal’ discursive constructions of the ‘Enlightenment’ in the Greek public sphere. The study is based on the analysis of articles published in two news/lifestyle websites, ‘AthensVoice’ and ‘Protagon’, during the (ongoing), so-called, ‘Greek crisis’. Discourse theory, informed by critical discourse analysis, is deployed to analyze these discursive constructions. The analysis shows that Greece’s economic/social/political problems are constructed as symptoms that underline Greece’s fundamental deficit, which is the country’s alleged ‘lack of ‘Enlightenment’, as perceived by ‘liberal’ voices in Greece and elsewhere. The article concludes that such discourses are part of a biopolitical, disciplinary framework producing the object to be reformed by austerity: an ‘un-Enlightened’ ‘Greek character’, ‘guilty’ for ‘self-inflicting’ Greece’s crisis. This ‘reform of character’ envisioned by liberals in Greece and elsewhere, is supposed to emerge through the institutional advance of neoliberal restructuring processes that include austerity reforms, privatizations, and loss of labor and civic rights, conditions to foster the neoliberal, entrepreneurial, mobile and austere subject, to potentially meet the socio-political requirements of late capitalist growth.
The study inquires on the ways content-specific social media pages
can function as alternative pu... more The study inquires on the ways content-specific social media pages
can function as alternative public spheres, by examining the
photography-orientated Facebook and YouTube pages entitled
‘old photographs of Thessaloniki’. The study focuses on the online
encountering of absences, notably events of socio-political
importance with a traumatic impact, which were marginalized by
historiography and erased from the city’s material form. In
particular, it looks at the ways these absences are witnessed,
remembered and negotiated online, through their formal and
informal traces. Departing from Benjamin’s and Agamben’s
theorizations of memory, media and witnessing, and Derrida’s
work on specters, the study concludes that the pages form a
highly informed digital archive in constant development that
fosters narratives enhancing cultural toleration and understanding,
while challenging official master frames. A class-orientated
understanding of the city’s ‘ruinification’ and oblivion is, however,
undermined, although it remains in a ‘spectral’ form.
Published at the Journal of Social Identities (September, 2016)
This article looks at the ways mainstream media discuss austerity and its failure to reach its
p... more This article looks at the ways mainstream media discuss austerity and its failure to reach its
proclaimed goals, to reduce public debt and to boost productivity in the heavily indebted countries of
the Eurozone’s periphery. This study analyzed Der Spiegel’s articles presenting the crisis and austerity
in Europe, focusing on the Greek case, from 2009 until 2014. A thematic analysis was developed in
the study a broad corpus of articles, focusing on the main ideas they unfold. Deploying critical political
economy literature, critical cultural theory and critical media studies literature, the article criticizes the
neoliberal hegemony of the EU’s crisis politics and foregrounds the role of mainstream media, including
progressivist or objectivist ones such as Spiegel, in the reproduction of neoliberal ideas that expand
far beyond the crisis, to produce the institutions, social relations, beliefs and subjectivities for a
post-crisis configuration of capitalism. The article concludes that Spiegel, like other mainstream media,
produce a biopolitical policing of the crisis’ exceptionalized subjects (the citizens of indebted countries)
and the implementation of crisis-politics by creating a public “structure of feeling” related to the hegemonic
crisis’ rationales. These rationales are further connected to the development of the new neoliberal
subjectivity, which is an objective of the crisis-reforms, such as austerity regimes. In effect, mainstream
media discourses reproduce the hegemonic frames of the crisis and austerity, while negating
the possibility of new narratives to emerge in the crisis context.
This article examines extreme-right online media as a site of discursive struggle over definition... more This article examines extreme-right online media as a site of discursive struggle over definitions of the causes, consequences and remedies of the European economic crisis. The authors focus on two Scandinavian countries, Denmark and Sweden, which have seen a rise in extreme-right activities across different arenas and in different media in the turbulent years since the collapse of global financial markets in 2008. Drawing on a discourse-theoretical framework that builds on the work of Laclau and Mouffe, the paper examines how the currently most active and visible extreme-right groups in these two countries understand and respond to the crisis as an opportunity to fuel anti-immigration discourses and prey on sentiments
of instability and insecurity in the broader population, using online media to “involve members and supporters in the discursive construction of racism”. The analysis demonstrates how these groups look to Greece, as the “crisis epicentre”, for culturalist explanations for the Eurozone crisis and to the rise there of Golden Dawn as an inspiration for future mobilisations in Nordic and pan-European coalitions.
Critical Discourse Studies, 2014 Vol. 11, No. 3, 305– 321, Taylor and Francis, May 2014
This article analyzes neoliberal articulations of the economic crisis in Greece, as they appear a... more This article analyzes neoliberal articulations of the economic crisis in Greece, as they appear at the Ekathimerini daily. Neoliberalism is primarily understood as the ideology organizing the political strategies of late capitalist production. The analysis focuses on the ways the capitalist crisis is presented in the context of Greece, as well as the ways that socio-political opposition to neoliberal reforms are addressed. Ekathimerini reproduces the hegemonic explanations of the crisis that view the crisis as a national and moral problem rather than a global and systemic one. The analysis draws concepts from both discourse theory and critical theory. Discourse theory analyzes the neoliberal discourse organizing the political interventions for the reproduction of capitalism in the crisis-context, while political economy critiques the materiality of the capitalist process, which itself is based on discourses and political interventions. The article concludes that Ekathimerini's crisis-coverage contributes to the form of social engineering organized by neoliberal policies in Greece, in order to produce the political and social norms for a post-crisis configuration of capitalism.
This article critically studies the hegemonic discursive construction of the EU's current (2012) ... more This article critically studies the hegemonic discursive construction of the EU's current (2012) economic crisis, as it is articulated by political and economic elites and by mass media. The study focuses on the political economy of the particular crisis and through the critical concept of reification, the study emphasizes the hegemonic naturalization of the economic crisis by the "free market" economistic ideology. The article problematizes the positioning of Greece as the "crisis epicentre" in Europe, understanding Greece as a scapegoat and as a laboratory where political strategies of capitalist restructuring of the EU are performed. Through the frame analysis of Bild-zeitung's headlines on the coverage of crisis-struck Greece, the article discusses a) the "culturalization" of the crisis and the diversion from a structural public debate on the global economic crisis b) the disciplinary function of crisis' publicity, related to social control and the production of new, neoliberal social subjectivities c) the alienating effect of the culturalist crisis discourses to transnational publics, resulting to the misrecognition of the ideological and structural reasons of the given crisis, the misrecognition of the effects of the crisis and crisis-politics in people's lives, the misrecognition of popular socio-political struggles in countries worse struck by crisis politics, and the eclipse of transnational solidarity and identification to the common issues that European people in particular are facing.
Uploads
Papers by Yiannis Mylonas
📺The proposed volume welcomes contributions on class-related perspectives regarding Greek media consumption practices and everyday media use (in both “old” and “new” media), media representations of class-related topics, as well as political economy analyses connected with questions of class politics and ownership of media conglomerates in the Greek media realm, and issues related to class dimensions connected with algorithmic biases in the Greek cybersphere.
✏️For more information, please check our extended Call for Contributions.
Call for contributions: “Media and Class in Greece” – Proposed edited volume | discourseanalysis
Peer reviewed articles by Yiannis Mylonas
dealing with the Greek revolutionary event of the 1940s.
Empirically, the study examines a growing corpus of different cultural
practices dealing with aspects of the Greek 1940s. These cultural
practices are viewed as counter-archives and conceptualized
using the notion of the proletarian public sphere associated with
counter-hegemonic legacies, discourses, narratives, and practices
situated in today’s Greek political antagonisms. The past is understood
to haunt the present in instances when the constitutive violence
of hegemonic discourses and institutions unfolds. The projects
studied create public presences of subjects and circumstances
repressed by the official Greek public sphere. This signifies a production
of knowledge from below, beyond what official knowledge
regimes foreground and exclude. The projects unfold utopian margins,
pointing towards the existence of a living social memory of
emancipatory and revolutionary struggles that remain incomplete.
Το άρθρο αυτό εστιάζει στη μελέτη των αναπαραστάσεων της ελληνικής κρίσης στον Τύπο της Γερμανίας και της Δανίας. Σχετικές μελέτες έχουν δείξει ότι τα Μέσα Μαζικής Ενημέρωσης βασίστηκαν σε μεγάλο βαθμό στην επίσημη εκδοχή της κρίσης, όπως αυτή διατυπώθηκε από Ευρωπαίους πολιτικούς ηγέτες, καθώς κι από επιφανείς τεχνοκράτες και οικονομολόγους. Η ανάλυση δείχνει ότι ο Λόγος (discourse) της κρίσης στα ΜΜΕ εκφράζεται με μετα-πολιτικούς όρους, πλαισιώνοντας την ελληνική κρίση με πολιτισμικά, ηθικιστικά και τεχνοκρατικά επιχειρήματα.
can function as alternative public spheres, by examining the
photography-orientated Facebook and YouTube pages entitled
‘old photographs of Thessaloniki’. The study focuses on the online
encountering of absences, notably events of socio-political
importance with a traumatic impact, which were marginalized by
historiography and erased from the city’s material form. In
particular, it looks at the ways these absences are witnessed,
remembered and negotiated online, through their formal and
informal traces. Departing from Benjamin’s and Agamben’s
theorizations of memory, media and witnessing, and Derrida’s
work on specters, the study concludes that the pages form a
highly informed digital archive in constant development that
fosters narratives enhancing cultural toleration and understanding,
while challenging official master frames. A class-orientated
understanding of the city’s ‘ruinification’ and oblivion is, however,
undermined, although it remains in a ‘spectral’ form.
Published at the Journal of Social Identities (September, 2016)
proclaimed goals, to reduce public debt and to boost productivity in the heavily indebted countries of
the Eurozone’s periphery. This study analyzed Der Spiegel’s articles presenting the crisis and austerity
in Europe, focusing on the Greek case, from 2009 until 2014. A thematic analysis was developed in
the study a broad corpus of articles, focusing on the main ideas they unfold. Deploying critical political
economy literature, critical cultural theory and critical media studies literature, the article criticizes the
neoliberal hegemony of the EU’s crisis politics and foregrounds the role of mainstream media, including
progressivist or objectivist ones such as Spiegel, in the reproduction of neoliberal ideas that expand
far beyond the crisis, to produce the institutions, social relations, beliefs and subjectivities for a
post-crisis configuration of capitalism. The article concludes that Spiegel, like other mainstream media,
produce a biopolitical policing of the crisis’ exceptionalized subjects (the citizens of indebted countries)
and the implementation of crisis-politics by creating a public “structure of feeling” related to the hegemonic
crisis’ rationales. These rationales are further connected to the development of the new neoliberal
subjectivity, which is an objective of the crisis-reforms, such as austerity regimes. In effect, mainstream
media discourses reproduce the hegemonic frames of the crisis and austerity, while negating
the possibility of new narratives to emerge in the crisis context.
of instability and insecurity in the broader population, using online media to “involve members and supporters in the discursive construction of racism”. The analysis demonstrates how these groups look to Greece, as the “crisis epicentre”, for culturalist explanations for the Eurozone crisis and to the rise there of Golden Dawn as an inspiration for future mobilisations in Nordic and pan-European coalitions.
📺The proposed volume welcomes contributions on class-related perspectives regarding Greek media consumption practices and everyday media use (in both “old” and “new” media), media representations of class-related topics, as well as political economy analyses connected with questions of class politics and ownership of media conglomerates in the Greek media realm, and issues related to class dimensions connected with algorithmic biases in the Greek cybersphere.
✏️For more information, please check our extended Call for Contributions.
Call for contributions: “Media and Class in Greece” – Proposed edited volume | discourseanalysis
dealing with the Greek revolutionary event of the 1940s.
Empirically, the study examines a growing corpus of different cultural
practices dealing with aspects of the Greek 1940s. These cultural
practices are viewed as counter-archives and conceptualized
using the notion of the proletarian public sphere associated with
counter-hegemonic legacies, discourses, narratives, and practices
situated in today’s Greek political antagonisms. The past is understood
to haunt the present in instances when the constitutive violence
of hegemonic discourses and institutions unfolds. The projects
studied create public presences of subjects and circumstances
repressed by the official Greek public sphere. This signifies a production
of knowledge from below, beyond what official knowledge
regimes foreground and exclude. The projects unfold utopian margins,
pointing towards the existence of a living social memory of
emancipatory and revolutionary struggles that remain incomplete.
Το άρθρο αυτό εστιάζει στη μελέτη των αναπαραστάσεων της ελληνικής κρίσης στον Τύπο της Γερμανίας και της Δανίας. Σχετικές μελέτες έχουν δείξει ότι τα Μέσα Μαζικής Ενημέρωσης βασίστηκαν σε μεγάλο βαθμό στην επίσημη εκδοχή της κρίσης, όπως αυτή διατυπώθηκε από Ευρωπαίους πολιτικούς ηγέτες, καθώς κι από επιφανείς τεχνοκράτες και οικονομολόγους. Η ανάλυση δείχνει ότι ο Λόγος (discourse) της κρίσης στα ΜΜΕ εκφράζεται με μετα-πολιτικούς όρους, πλαισιώνοντας την ελληνική κρίση με πολιτισμικά, ηθικιστικά και τεχνοκρατικά επιχειρήματα.
can function as alternative public spheres, by examining the
photography-orientated Facebook and YouTube pages entitled
‘old photographs of Thessaloniki’. The study focuses on the online
encountering of absences, notably events of socio-political
importance with a traumatic impact, which were marginalized by
historiography and erased from the city’s material form. In
particular, it looks at the ways these absences are witnessed,
remembered and negotiated online, through their formal and
informal traces. Departing from Benjamin’s and Agamben’s
theorizations of memory, media and witnessing, and Derrida’s
work on specters, the study concludes that the pages form a
highly informed digital archive in constant development that
fosters narratives enhancing cultural toleration and understanding,
while challenging official master frames. A class-orientated
understanding of the city’s ‘ruinification’ and oblivion is, however,
undermined, although it remains in a ‘spectral’ form.
Published at the Journal of Social Identities (September, 2016)
proclaimed goals, to reduce public debt and to boost productivity in the heavily indebted countries of
the Eurozone’s periphery. This study analyzed Der Spiegel’s articles presenting the crisis and austerity
in Europe, focusing on the Greek case, from 2009 until 2014. A thematic analysis was developed in
the study a broad corpus of articles, focusing on the main ideas they unfold. Deploying critical political
economy literature, critical cultural theory and critical media studies literature, the article criticizes the
neoliberal hegemony of the EU’s crisis politics and foregrounds the role of mainstream media, including
progressivist or objectivist ones such as Spiegel, in the reproduction of neoliberal ideas that expand
far beyond the crisis, to produce the institutions, social relations, beliefs and subjectivities for a
post-crisis configuration of capitalism. The article concludes that Spiegel, like other mainstream media,
produce a biopolitical policing of the crisis’ exceptionalized subjects (the citizens of indebted countries)
and the implementation of crisis-politics by creating a public “structure of feeling” related to the hegemonic
crisis’ rationales. These rationales are further connected to the development of the new neoliberal
subjectivity, which is an objective of the crisis-reforms, such as austerity regimes. In effect, mainstream
media discourses reproduce the hegemonic frames of the crisis and austerity, while negating
the possibility of new narratives to emerge in the crisis context.
of instability and insecurity in the broader population, using online media to “involve members and supporters in the discursive construction of racism”. The analysis demonstrates how these groups look to Greece, as the “crisis epicentre”, for culturalist explanations for the Eurozone crisis and to the rise there of Golden Dawn as an inspiration for future mobilisations in Nordic and pan-European coalitions.
XING - Ein Kulturmagazin Wirtschaftsjournalismus, based on http://www.triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/380/406
Article to be published by Stasis in 2021
This article presents a critical analysis of the press coverage of the so-called ‘Greferendum’, a referendum called by the left-led coalition government of Greece in July 2015, concerning the future of austerity regimes in the country. The study focuses at the coverage of the particular event by the conservative daily press of Denmark, one of the ‘core’ EU countries, which is not part of the Eurozone. The study was based in the collection and analysis of all relevant articles published in the newspapers 'Berlingske Tidende' and 'Jyllands Posten' between the 29th of June, when the decision for the ‘Greferendum’ was publicly announced, and the 17th of July, after the ‘Greferendum’ results became public, and the Greek government’s eventual caving in to its creditors demands (as represented by the 'Troika') for the continuation of austerity regimes. The analysis developed is a qualitative, thematic one. The articles selected were read and coded according to the main themes they included in their developing of the Greek crisis, austerity and referendum case. These codes were then organized according to three, interrelated, broad thematic categories, based on relevant critical theory analyzing hegemonic public discourses. The broad thematic categories are “a post-democratic realism”, “the upper-class gaze” and “orientalism and cultural racism”. The study concludes that all newspapers reproduce the prevailing hegemonic frames in favor of austerity that circulate in other European public spheres too.
Αντίσταση στις ελληνικές ταινίες μυθοπλασίας μεγάλου μήκους από το 1945 μέχρι
το 1981 αποτελεί μια συστηματική καταγραφή και μελέτη όλων των ελληνικών
ταινιών που αναφέρονται στα γεγονότα της Κατοχής της Ελλάδας από τη
Γερμανία και τις συμμαχικές της χώρες (Ιταλία και Βουλγαρία) κατά τον Β΄
Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο, και της Αντίστασης στους κατακτητές (ιδίως στους
Γερμανούς), όπως αποτυπώθηκαν στον ελληνικό κινηματογράφο των πρώτων
δεκαετιών μετά την Απελευθέρωση. Η μελέτη εστιάζει στην ελληνική
κινηματογραφική παραγωγή των ετών 1945-1981, μιας περιόδου ιδιαίτερα
σημαντικής, καθώς συμπυκνώνει μια πληθώρα πολιτικών γεγονότων και
εξελίξεων. Η συγκεκριμένη μελέτη παρουσιάζει τις νοηματοδοτήσεις των εν
λόγω γεγονότων, τόσο στον εμπορικό όσο και στον καλλιτεχνικό
κινηματογράφο, έτσι όπως αυτές διαμορφώνονται στην ταραγμένη αυτή
ιστορική περίοδο, αντανακλώντας τα εκάστοτε πολιτικά διακυβεύματα που
θέτει τόσο η κυρίαρχη εξουσία, όσο και η ίδια η κοινωνία. Όπως χαρακτηριστικά
σημειώνει ο συγγραφέας «οι ταινίες μυθοπλασίας μεγάλου μήκους
αντιμετωπίστηκαν ως μαρτυρίες για την εποχή που γυρίστηκαν» (σ. 322).
The “Greek Crisis” in Europe: Race, Class and Politics, critically analyses the publicity of the Greek debt crisis, by studying Greek, Danish and German mainstream media during the crisis’ early years (2009-2015). Mass media everywhere reproduced a sensualistic “Greek crisis” spectacle, while iterating neoliberal and occidentalist ideological myths. Overall, the Greek people were deemed guilty of a systemic crisis, supposedly enjoying lavish lifestyles at the EU’s expense. Using concrete examples, this study foregrounds neo-orientalist, neo-racist and classist stereotypes deployed in the construction and media coverage of the Greek crisis. These media practices are connected to the “soft politics” of the crisis, which produce public consensus over neoliberal reforms such as austerity and privatizations, and secure debt repayment from democratic interventions.