‘Creating our Seat at the Table' - Analyzing the epistemic formation of counterpublics in the Instagram series Sitzplatzreservierung

Weiß, Ana-Nzinga (2025): ‘Creating our Seat at the Table' - Analyzing the epistemic formation of counterpublics in the Instagram series Sitzplatzreservierung. ECREA Diaspora, Migration and the Media - International and Intercultural Communication Sections Conference, Tallinn, Estland, 16. - 18. September 2025.

Abstract

In international comparison, Germany has rather hesitantly discussed racism in public debates (Salem & Thompson, 2016). This public disengagement with racism was interrupted in the summer of 2020, when German traditional mass media reacted to worldwide Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of Afro-American George Floyd. However, traditional mass media were soon met with public criticism. Especially on social media platforms, content creators started to publish formats complementing, critiquing, or countering traditional media’s engagement. One of these initiatives was Sitzplatzreservierung (translating to ‘seat reservation’), a series of videos published on Instagram in which Black Germans talk about their everyday experiences with racism.

Against the hegemonic resistance to critically talk about racism, Sitzplatzreservierung marked a novel account of publicly approaching the topic. A common concept used to describe endeavors that collectively share non-dominant discursive claims is the one of counterpublics. Squires (2002) critiques that this broad conceptualization, does no longer serve to ‘distinguish amongst marginal publics and their activities’ (p. 460). Sitzplatzreservierung particularly highlights the importance of the epistemic dimension of counterpublics: Black Germans claim a seat at the table as knowers of their lifeworld beyond the hegemonic norm. I argue that focusing the epistemic formation of counterpublics can add more nuance to their conceptualization and their relation to the dominant public sphere. My argument is based on the philosophical paradigm of social epistemology and the theoretical presumption that knowledge is produced socially, in interactions with other people, instances, systems, etc. (Goldman & Whitcomb, 2011, pp. 11–12). Accordingly, counterpublics can be viewed as producing ‘nondominant forms of knowledge’ (Jackson & Foucault Welles, 2015, pp. 933–934) that challenge the assumption of a universal, objective, unmarked and disembodied knowledge in dominant publics. To illustrate my claim, I present the results of my Critical Discourse Analysis of all 14 videos published under Sitzplatzreservierung.

• Item Type: Speech
• Faculties: Social Sciences > Department of Communications and Media (IfKW)
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology
• Language: English