Testimony is increasingly produced online, in networked, multimedia environments. Here, contributions cluster around hashtags such as #SayTheirNames or #Migratoechter and thumbstoppers like “Arab mothers, when Tupperware” (@datteltaeter).
The project departs from the observation that formats circulating on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram – including stories, reels, stitches, satire, and opinion content – constitute a new hybrid practice of witnessing (media witnessing). Testimony no longer appears as a singular act of a witness, but as an ongoing process in which multiple subject positions intersect: it emerges as a relational, networked practice shaped by users, platforms, infrastructures, and algorithms.
Against this background, the dissertation investigates how digital transformation reshapes technical conditions, infrastructures, and social practices of witnessing. It further explores the potential for collaborative, solidary practices that bear witness to racist exclusion, unsettle it performatively, and render the post-migrant #SocietyOfTheMany legible as what it is: lived reality.
The project is situated at the intersection of testimony studies, critical migration studies, media studies, and digital anthropology. It examines practices of witnessing that operate in a mode of immanence: society bears witness to itself.
About:
Marlene Hempel works at the intersection of Media Studies, Visual Anthropology and Critical Migration Studies. Her research explores discourses, digital publics and media practices through which belonging, participation and social justice are negotiated. Her MA thesis at the University of Göttingen examined postmigrant interventions in the discourse of German reunification and their implications for public memory. She also worked as a research assistant in the European research project RESPOND: Multilevel Governance of Mass Migration in Europe and Beyond.
Since 2022, she has been an editor in the Migration Department of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Additional professional experience includes communications work for Mediendienst Integration, GermanDream and Sinneswandel.
She is currently a doctoral researcher in the Research Training Group “Technologies of Witnessing” at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Alongside her research, she teaches Visual Anthropology in Göttingen and Mainz, connecting academic work with her practice as a documentary filmmaker and camera operator.
Email: mhempel@uni-mainz.de
