T(w)o move(s), or not to move? - that's the quantum question

Studenteropgave: Kandidatspeciale og HD afgangsprojekt

  • Katrine Løvgaard
  • Mona Fladstrand Sørensen
4. semester, Kommunikation, Kandidat (Kandidatuddannelse)
Abstract
The practice of journalism is changing. Through a building pressure for journalists, from both society and from within the practice, to meet high demands regarding transparency in journalistic papers, the field changes. Changes that influence the field of possibility regarding how, it becomes possible to practice journalism.

This study investigates how the material-discursive practice of journalism is reconfigured through a dynamic contingent multiplicity of co-constituent human and nonhuman agencies. When studied through the quantum inspired methodology agential realism, the material-discursive practice of journalism is diffracted as a dis/continuous phenomenon of the world’s dynamic and differential becoming. Hereby a reconfigured standard for accountability and responsibility of the phenomena’s partaking in shaping and creating the world is set.

A thorough introduction of agential realism functions as a fundamental basis and method for the further analysis as to how the practice of journalism is becoming through an apparatus of constitutive human and nonhuman agencies. Since the methodology implies that ethics, ontology and epistemology is to be thought of as entangled this research offers a reconfigured approach to research. To accommodate the new-materialistic paradigm, this master thesis is further more inspired by the newspaper genre and hereby it supports the paradigm’s attention to materiality as performative agency.

Through agential realism it becomes impossible to consider human agency as any more important than matter (nonhuman agency). At the same time it is impossible to consider phenomena as preexisting entities in the world. These fundamental changes in the understanding of humans role in the world leads to a reconfigured way to be objective and accountable in the practice of journalism, which is what this master thesis strives to contribute with. By analyzing multimodal constitutive processes in empirical research and concrete cases the dynamic becoming of journalism is investigated.

The master thesis concludes that many/much human and nonhuman agencies are performing through the journalists and the practice of journalism. Through agential realism and multimodal constitutive analysis it becomes necessary to reconsider the role of the journalist as being the sole author in the material-discursive practice, journalism.
SprogDansk
Udgivelsesdato31 maj 2013
Antal sider131
ID: 76957331