With the global pandemic and related measures such as border closures, lockdowns and social distancing, anthropology and many aspects of life have moved into the world of the digital. In a new online journal, students and researchers of the study program M.A. Visual and Media Anthropology have devoted themselves to a wide variety of aspects of this digital transformation of anthropology and focused on phenomena of the digitized world from an anthropological perspective.
For the new issue of the VMA Journal, they created eight films and a text article representing different fields of research and unique perspectives from around the virtual world.
For example, the journal includes a cinematic portrait of a young man struggling with the death of his father and not being able to return home due to border closures. Another contributor examined the current boom of online dating apps in times of Corona. In another example of screencast cinema, the housing crisis in Berlin is the focus of the ethnographic analysis. The film highlights the tension between structural problems of gentrification and rising rents, with tenants, subtenants and those looking for a new place to stay.
