Trump is back in office, letting Elon Musk loose and apparently giving in to Russia’s demands as far as Ukraine is concerned, all the while looking to see if he can get access to Ukraine’s minerals. Climate mitigating legislation has been and will be slashed further, while Ulrich Merz, newly elected Chancellor of Germany, is calling for greater European defence spending: these are troubling times.

As we face the number of crises afflicting the world, it becomes pivotal to ask again: what role does television play in this chaos and what role should it play? In this podcast, we are discussing television in relation to governance. What is governance, how do we understand it? What role do algorithms play in (political) decision making and in potentially pushing audiences towards certain understandings, and what push back is there from the bottom? What can public service television deliver against this? These questions and more are raised – rather than really answered in this podcast which we hope to follow up in a few weeks’ time.

Listen to our conversation here.

 

 

David Levente Palatinus is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Trnava and at the Technical University of Liberec. He is also founder of the Anthropocene Media Lab. His research moves between and across visual studies, digital media, and cultural theory. His current projects include work on climate, conflict and migration, and human-nonhuman relations in the Anthropocene. His recent publications include two edited collections J.R.R. Tolkien in Central Europe: Context, Directions and the Legacy. Routledge, 2023 (with Janka Kascakova), and Itinerari LIX: Perspectives in the Anthropocene: Beyond Nature and Culture. (Mimesis Edizioni, 2020, with Stefania Achella).

Elke Weissmann is Reader in Film and Television at Edge Hill University. Her books include Transnational Television Drama (Palgrave) and the edited collection Renewing Feminisms (I.B.Tauris) with Helen Thornham. She is an ECREA editor for Critical Studies in Television. She is currently working on a book on national industries in the transnational world of global high-end drama. She migrated to the UK in 2002 after realising that German television was as bad as she remembered.

 

References

Foucault, M. and Rabinow, P. (1997) Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984: Volume 1: Ethics. London: Penguin.

Jenner, M. (2018) Netflix and the re-invention of television. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kelly, J. (2019) “Television by the numbers: The challenges of audience measurement in the age of Big Data,” Convergence, 25(1), pp. 113–132. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517700854.

Stivers, C. (2010) Governance in Dark Times : Practical Philosophy for Public Service. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctt2tt756 (Accessed: February 25, 2025).