Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: The television station "ARTE" and the production of Europe

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Graduate student Damien Stankiewicz, supervised by Dr. Susan Carol Rogers, will undertake research on the relationship between governmental use of mass media, recent European economic and political integration, and nation building. The research will be conducted at the Franco-German and European cultural television station, ARTE, whose particular mandate is to increase European unity. In the last two decades, European integration has been understood increasingly as not only an economic and political structuring, but also as social and cultural structuring. The mass media often are employed to achieve this. Stankiewicz, who is fluent in French, will conduct twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork at the station''s headquarters in Strasbourg, France. His focus will be on how ARTE staff, who come from many different European nations, determine what Europe means for the television station''''s activities; how the staff translate these ideas into specific programming; and what relationship there is between ideas of a unified Europe that come from official, institutional contexts, mandates, and funding structures, and those that might come out of the staff''''s everyday lived experiences of multinational work. He will use a mixed methods ethnographic approach to data collection. This will include participant observation as a station news intern, and analysis of the production and content of programs specifically intended to explain one European country to another; documentation and analysis of marketing and audience-targeting strategies; observation and analysis workplace relationships; as well as in-depth interviewing. This research will add a new dimension to social science theories of the role of culture in nation building and supra-nation building, an understudied topic of considerable international importance. Painstaking, micro-level ethnographic research, such as is being undertaken here, makes it possible to understand the complex ways in which governmental ideas are or are not translated into practice. The research also will contribute to the education of a social scientist.