Racism in Public Debate

In the summer of 2020, the killing of George Floyd sparked Black Lives Matter protests which reverberated far beyond the United States. In Germany, these protests triggered an intense public reckoning with racism, which played out across traditional and social media platforms. Ana-Nzinga Weiß analysed this debate as it moved between political talk shows on public service broadcasting, YouTube, and Instagram, asking who gained visibility, authority, and legitimacy. The result is a nuanced account of how intersectional power relations shape democratic discourse in an increasingly hybrid media landscape.

Ana-Nzinga Weiß works as a research associate at the Institute for Communication Science at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. She did her doctorate at Freie Universität Berlin and her PhD research was funded by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement of the European Union. Her research interests include media and social inequality from a Critical Race Theoretical perspective, epistemic hierarchies, as well as participation and socio-cultural change in hybrid media systems.