Principal Investigators:

Researchers:

„This project examines media of cooperation in Morocco and the Moroccan diaspora in Europe. It explores the emergence, fragmentation, and reconfiguration of publics in processes of social transformation.“

Executive Summary

The sub-project focuses on media practices in Morocco and the Moroccan diaspora and analyzes the emergence of current public spheres and forms of cooperation in the transformation processes in North Africa. In the first phase of the project, the establishing and researching a MediaSpace/Computer Club was used to investigate how transnationally far-reaching forms of cooperation in economic, tourism and development-related contexts produce hierarchized public spheres in the High Atlas. In the second phase, an intra-Moroccan and intercontinental comparison was used to examine how media practices form fragmented public spheres under conditions of political repression and transnational mobility. In addition to a computer club in Dortmund, which was brought into the project as (research-) infrastructure, a media space was set up in Al-Hoceima as a center of political protests in the Rif. In the third phase, media environments are now focused on increasingly monitored public spheres of (post-) colonial social formations. For this purpose, state and non-state media practices of monitoring, tracing and surveillance in Morocco and the Moroccan diaspora are to be examined and a Euro-Mediterranean overall picture of hierarchized, fragmented and monitored public spheres is to be developed.

The continuing comparative research and design of cooperative media use takes into account the increasingly intertwined public spheres in Euro-Mediterranean societies. In the central Moroccan Atlas, northern Moroccan Rif and Moroccan diaspora, ecological, political and economic crises manifest themselves differently, so that media-technical foundations of civil society cooperation, social mobilization and political surveillance can be adequately researched through the proven double access. The socio-informatics part should define specific design requirements for digital media, implement them as prototypes and evaluate them. The media-ethnological part is intended to examine the conditions and forms of cooperation that arise, resulting from the different uses of new media. In a locally structured but at the same time transnationally networked community, cooperation is characterized by the clash of different interests and orders of legitimation as well as by locally different affordances, whose ethnographic research informs the principles of participatory design. The combination of ethnology and socio-informatics should help clarify the conditions of political surveillance and civil society cooperation in situations of upheaval and contribute to differentiating a concept of the public sphere that includes hierarchized transitions between protected interior and representative exterior spaces as well as their fragmentation and control.