Promising Images of Love
Principal Investigator (PI) for the University of Macerata:
PD Dr. Marie-Therese Mäder (m.maeder@lmu.de)
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Carla Danani (carla.danani@unimc.it)
Funded by EU Horizon
(Marie Skłodowska Curie Action - Individual Fellowship)
Duration: March 2022 – February 2024
Fig. . The wedding photograph of my grandparents Werner Baumgartner and Maria Theresia Schlenk, Burgdorf, canton of Bern/ Switzerland, May 15, 1936 (image owned by M-T. Mäder)..
How do contemporary media representations of religious and secular weddings in Europe communicate norms and values? The project scrutinizes how media representations and practices enclose and reshape religious and secular norms and values with a focus on the mediatisation of weddings. This interdisciplinary study draws on theories from the study of religion, cultural studies, media ethics and applies a multi-methodological approach. The field work of wedding practices includes participatory observation of weddings and narrative-biographical interviews with wedding photographers and married couples in Switzerland, Italy and Germany.
Digital and electronic media play a central role in contemporary wedding rituals, be it during the preparation, the ritual itself or afterwards. Wedding photographers and videographers stage the couple during the wedding ritual and reception/party and these depictions shape the wedding couple’s and their guests’ memories in the future. Weddings are understood as a constitutive rite de passage that is commonly practiced in religious traditions as well as in a variety of cultural and secular contexts. Secular and religious traits of wedding rituals produce a complex and often complementary relationship. Wedding practices shape and communicate the gender, social, cultural and economic values of individuals and groups. This interdisciplinary research project considers theories from the study of religion, cultural studies, media ethics, and political philosophy and applies a multi-methodological approach that includes media analysis, ethnographic studies, and qualitative methods. The project scrutinizes how media representations and practices enclose and reshape religious and secular norms and values as well as stereotypes with the intent to highlight the performativity of their mediatisation. Due to the power of images media ethical questions arise and the research provides a theoretical framework to discuss it. One of the intended short-term results is to suggest best practice for social actors in the field of wedding media productions and to develop research tools for analysing the mediatisation of values and norms. Long-term results are to increase social awareness of the performativity of images (that express hierarchical relationships among individuals, genders and in religions), in order to strengthen a more inclusive, secure, innovative, and reflective European society and culture, to improve respect and to prevent subordination.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101024115