TIKTOK KOLLOQUIUM

Fake appeals for donations, performative relief actions and tracking homeless people in inner cities – in team with author Janita-Marja Juvonen, we will analyse aesthetics and strategies of staging homelessness in the social media. In this podcast episode, we focus on TikTok videos where content creators stage and enact homelessness in order to extend their reach, but also on staging examples with which homeless people try to counter these stereotypical depictions.

What images are created here, how do they have a political and emotional impact, and what do they reveal about power relations and the aestheticization of social inequality—right now, during the Christmas season?

TIKTOK KOLLOQUIUM is hosted by Vera Klocke and Freya Herrmann, creators of the podcast Fashion the Gaze, who will talk about the political impacts and implications of today’s social media staging strategies. You may consider the analysis of these media representations as a form of resistance and cultural critique in a time of rightwing populist normalization.

Freya Herrmann is a costume designer and screenwriter. Vera Klocke is head of the consumer culture research centre at Hildesheim University and a freelance author. Fashion the Gaze is a monthly live podcast available for download on all podcast platforms.

Janita-Marja Juvonen is the author of „Die Anderen – Die harte Realität der Obdachlosigkeit“ (Them – The harsh reality of homelessness). Her next book is due to be published next year. For 14 years, she has experienced homelessness and now seeks to build bridges rather than having to sleep beneath them, with the aim to bring people who have a home and those who have not, together.