Architects of Communication Scholarship

Ellen Wartella 0:02
ICA presents. Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of ICA Podcast Network. Today our architect is Barbara Pfetsch. Barbara Pfetsch is the Director of the Institute of Media and Communication at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she is a professor of communication studies, communication theory, and media effects. She is also an ICA Fellow and principal investigator of the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, which is the German Internet Institute in Berlin. Today, Barbara is in conversation with Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Associate Professor of Communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And here is Neta Kligler-Vilenchik.

Neta Kligler 0:44
Hello, everyone! Barbara, it's such a pleasure to be interviewing you today, as we have been working closely the past five years. So, I'm very excited today about the opportunity to learn more about your background and for you to share your story with the ICA community. So, to start us off, Barbara, do you want to tell us a little bit about your personal history, how you came into academia and into the field of communication?

Barbara Pfetsch 1:08
Thank you. Initially, I started out as a journalist, and I've always wanted to become a political journalist. I did a two-year traineeship with a very small local newspaper in the German countryside. I decided to go to university, then I enrolled myself in political science in Mannheim University in Germany, which is a school of empirical social science, actually. Then also became a student assistant to the Chair of International Social Science and Comparative Politics, which also paved the way for doing comparative research all my life. Since I have been a journalist and was working as a journalist, when I studied within those political scientists and other students, I was the media person, which meant that I really focused on all kinds of questions of political communication and media within political science and within political culture studies and so on. Then, this was the time in the mid-80s, when in Germany there was the media revolution, which at the time was the introduction of commercial television. We had public television only. There were new technical infrastructures and commercial television was introduced. That was when there was a lot of research money. My professor got a research grant to study the social consequences of the introduction of commercial television, so after I took my MA degree, I started in this project. I wrote up my PhD dissertation, which was on the political consequences of commercial media use and its impact on political orientations. At the same time, this project was finished because the money ran out, so I had no job anymore. This resulted in the project being incorporated in a big media research center, which at the time was directed by Winfried Schulz who has been, and still is, a very famous communication scholar. Within my PhD project, I ended up in this group of communication scholars and finished my PhD within this framework. Suddenly, my writing was no longer the writing of a political journalist; I was no longer a political scientist, but a media and communication scholar. I had lost my voice as a journalist and ended up as a researcher. I went as a postdoctoral student to Georgetown University in Washington, [DC]. I was still thrilled by political communication and the next idea was to study the interface between media and politics. That was what was puzzling me. So I came to Washington, DC very naively, because I wanted to study what was happening at the White House. I wanted to interview White House journalists and the White House press corps. I had no clue how to get into this group. But luckily, my landlord in Washington went to church with Judy Woodruff, who was a PBS anchor. And he said, "Why don't you speak to her?" And believe it or not, after one year I had 30 interviews with all his White House people and the journalists of the press corps in Washington, DC. Then I went back to Germany and did the same thing in Germany because I knew the person who was heading the Chancellor's press office. I had 60 interviews with these people. And as I was a quantitative empirical scholar, I started to transcribe them and analyzed it in a very complicated content analysis and wrote my second PhD dissertation. After a year, I went back to Mannheim, first as an assistant professor, and then I changed to Berlin, to the science center in Berlin. I ended up in a research unit about social movements in the public sphere. As I had been a political scientist and a communication scholar, I suddenly found myself in a group of public sphere sociologists, which also influenced me very much as I'm now doing more movement studies in public discourse.

Neta Kligler 5:36
So, can you tell me a little bit about some of your mentors in the field, you mentioned, Schulz, maybe other figures who were central to you?

Barbara Pfetsch 5:45
Well, I had two mentors in political science who were Max Kaase and Rudolf Wildenmann. They were scholars of political institutions, political behavior, and survey research, basically, election studies, political culture. They were my mentors in the PhD work. But as I moved on, I learned much from Winfried Schulz and all the communication crowd. And then, of course, in Berlin, I studied with Friedhelm Neidhardt and learned much about public sphere research and social movements. I realized that in each field, I had a kind of intellectual role model, who was an empirical scholar and a normative scholar and a system scholar. For instance, in empirical political science Lazarsfeld is a big name. And in a more narrower field, for me, Jay Blumler was very important, because he started comparative communication studies, which I also did in Germany. I've always looked up to people who have a normative view and who focus on democracy and who care about how democracies are functioning and what communication does within the framework of democracy. For instance, my colleague and friend, Lance Bennett, who is a never-ending scholar of media and democracy.

Neta Kligler 7:08
How would you describe your area of research today? And maybe also, how has this changed over the years?

Barbara Pfetsch 7:15
I'm somewhere floating in between political communication, political discourse and public sphere, and also comparative studies of communication. What is really puzzling is that on the one hand, media systems have changed so dramatically, turned into digital infrastructures and digital ecosystems. But on the other hand, political systems have changed and democracy is no longer a given. When I studied, it was democratic political cultures, and we were not skeptical about this, that democracy is the best thing. But now, it's also the disruption of democracy and changing political systems. And within this kind of tension, I would see my work. So, it's no longer media and journalism and politics, but it's in a much broader sense, what is happening in this hybrid media system? How is political activism being practiced in the media? How are political conflicts communicated? To what degree does the hybrid media system and social media and online platforms allow transnational linkages in communication? In a way, this is a quite natural development for all communication scholars.

Neta Kligler 8:39
It's really interesting how you're raising the fact that both the media ecosystem but also the sense of stability of democracies has changed. And maybe also our focus from focusing more on harmony and stability to being more aware of conflict and the margins and what happens.

Barbara Pfetsch 8:55
Definitely. And in the Habermas writings about discourse, there is rational discourse and it all ends in a really nice consensus. And what you see empirically is no consensus. It's really dissonant public spheres, as I called it. It's fragmentation, disconnection, and this also means that there are new dynamics and that interests me on the right side of the political spectrum, and also on the left side. And that drives me in many different projects.

Neta Kligler 9:25
So there is the focus on the normative, but an attempt to bridge that with the empirical and actual lived experience?

What are important lessons that you feel you've learned along the way that you would like to impart to younger scholars?

Barbara Pfetsch 9:33
Yes, definitely. I mean, the normative framework is the motivation, because we want to know what's happening with our democracies, and we don't like what we see. But, yet, we have to take one step back and use our tools and we need to analyze first before we end up in normative conclusions.

Oh, that's a complicated question. I really hope that I can pass on some enthusiasm for being curious, some sense of that what we study is relevant for people and society. And also some sense for analytical scrutiny. It's successes and failures, so we have to also be robust to cope in a way. I think intellectual work is really hard work. I've seen young scholars who after some time eventually found out they do not have this resilience or the endurance and patience. So, one needs some sort of intrinsic motivation to do this.

Neta Kligler 10:47
Yeah, remembering why we're doing what we're doing.

Barbara Pfetsch 10:50
Luckily, I've been working with many women. When I grew up, there were hardly any women. I'm very happy that this has improved over the years.

Neta Kligler 10:59
In your area of research, what do you think are big intellectual questions and big societal challenges for communication scholars to address in the next decade or so?

Barbara Pfetsch 11:12
Communication about global problems is important and how this trickles down and translates into people's local communities and also in their life. How this impacts and what we can do as communication scholars to translate this. We are also in the position to find out how these mechanisms of translation work in different contexts. I guess a very big question for communication scholars is the question of truth and trust because that is the very basis of our social interaction- that we can rely on what the other says is true and what we learn from social media, what we learn from the news media is true and trustful. This is a really, really big question. And then I have a very European issue, which is the quality of communication and the survival of public media.

Neta Kligler 12:08
The podcast series is titled Architects of Communication Scholarship, so I would like to ask you, what you would say that you have built?

Barbara Pfetsch 12:16
That is a very difficult question. I perceive myself as a piece in an accumulation of knowledge. I really believe that science is a system of skepticism but also it's a cumulative business and we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. And I hope I have built some kind of sense and a school of good research and thinking about the relevant questions, about us and humankind and society, which are the big questions, but we break it down, and we need to break it down into our research. And I hope that the people around me and my students and my PhD scholars join in and share this enthusiasm. So, I've built a really nice international network, but not only a network of really great scholars, but also great people. And that's in the end what counts.

Neta Kligler 13:17
Thank you so much for this conversation. I was so honored to interview you and I've learned so much from you in this conversation and always. And I look forward to learn from your future work as well and see where the work on democracy, media and foundation, people and research, good questions and good methods, where all that brings us.

Ellen Wartella 13:35
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network and is sponsored by the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. Our producers are Jacqueline Colarusso and Sharlene Burgos. Our production consultant is Nick Song. Our executive producers are DeVante Brown and Aldo Diaz Caballero. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening.