Distributed Productivities

Vinzenz Hediger is Professor of Cinema Studies at the Goethe University, Frankfurt and the Director of the Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film.” He is a co-founder of NECS – European Network for Cinema and Media Studies and the founding editor of the Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (Journal for Media Studies). He is a principal investigator in the research center “ConTrust – Trust and Conflict in political life under conditions of uncertainty” and a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz. His research concerns the aesthetics of film within the larger framework of a history of risk and uncertainty in modernity. His objects of study include Hollywood cinema and industrial and ephemeral films. In addition, he has a strong interest in the main currents, deviations, and dead ends in the histories of film theories, an interest that he pursues in part as the co-editor of the book series Film Theory in Media History. In the Kolleg he conjoins these two interests by inquiring into the ways in which the history of cinema has always been a history of a form, and format, in crisis.

Matthias Krings is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. He has specialized in the study of African popular culture, media and visual anthropology, the anthropology of the body, and religion. His current research focuses on East African video jockeys who appropriate foreign films by remediating them through oral narrative performances; on the global mainstreaming of African popular music (recently labelled ‘Afrobeats’); and on skin colour-based categorization practices beyond racialization. Among his publications are edited volumes about ‘Global Nollywood’ and Tanzanian ‘Bongo Media Worlds’. His most recent book, ‘African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media,’ was published by Indiana University Press. He has done extensive fieldwork in Nigeria and Tanzania.

Bertram Lang is a political scientist, China specialist, and academic coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Centre for East Asian Studies (IZO) at Goethe University Frankfurt. Since June 2021, Bertram has also served as academic coordinator of the CEDITRAA project, where he takes a particular interest in Chinese cultural soft power efforts and their limitations in African countries. His broader expertise is in China’s foreign policy and its impact on international norms, with a focus on the non-profit sector, anti-corruption, and Europe-China relations. In his recently completed dissertation, he analyses the transnational politics of Chinese philanthropy from an institutionalist perspective and traces global diffusion processes of organisational logics and legitimacy standards beyond the state.

Cornelia Storz holds the Chair of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research focuses on how incumbent firms and entrepreneurs innovate, how universities stimulate knowledge creation, how organisations are facilitated by their institutional environment, and how digital firms are managing identities. Cornelia also works on issues on innovation and entrepreneurship in developing countries. In her most recent work, she explores new methods such as computer vision to analyse product similarity.