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ReDICo: The Podcast for Digital Interculturality

The ReDICo Research Co-operative
Since 11/2024 9 episodes

S2E6: “Social E-maginaries, the Internet and German Windows: A Conversation with Yolanda López García”

2025-10-30 38 min

Description & Show Notes

In the sixth and final episode of the series Fergal Lenehan and Luisa Conti, from the Centre for Digital Interculturality Studies, talk to Yolanda López García from the Technical University of Chemnitz, where she is Junior Professor for Intercultural Praxis with a Focus on Digital Cultures at the Institute for German and Intercultural Communications. The conversation touches on viewing interculturality as an emerging imaginary, Yolanda’s work on digital influencers in Germany and their so-called “migratory experience”, the case of German windows, the obsession with lüften (airing an apartment or house), and Yolanda’s theoretical concept of the “e-maginary”.   

So, will intercultural digital influencers eventually replace guidebooks and intercultural trainings?

Listen to find out!

For more information on ReDICo and the ReDICo Centre for Digital Interculturality Studies, see: www.redico.eu

To join the ReDICo Hub, go to: https://hub.redico.eu 

Visit the ReDICo YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DigInterculture 

Transcript

Chapter 1: Introduction Hello, and you're very welcome to ReDICo, the podcast for digital interculturality. So this science podcast is brought to you by the Centre for Digital Intercultural Studies, which is presently based at the University of Jena. Our interest is in the intersection between intercultural communications and internet studies. And this episode is the second series of our podcast dedicated to the topic of “Internet Futures”. So the first series looked at “Freedom and the Internet” and is still available from most podcast platforms. So, yes, I'm joined today by my colleague from the Center for Digital Intercultural Studies, Luisa Conti. Hello, everyone. And our guest today is Yolanda López García. Hi, everyone. So Yolanda is somebody that we know very well. She is our former colleague from Jena, from the University of Jena, where she did her PhD and wrote a book about the social imaginaries and the life stories of Mexican migrants in Germany. This dissertation was published then by the Transcript Publishing House and is called Imaginaries of Migration, Life Stories of Mexican Migrants in Germany, and I can only recommend it for anybody who's interested in the topic. She is now based at the Chemnitz University of Technology at the Institute for German and Intercultural Communications and in Chemnitz, Yolanda is Junior Professor of Intercultural Praxis with a Focus on Digital Cultures. Chapter 2: Digital Creators and “Migratory Experience” So, Yolanda, you've made the journey to us here in the studio. Yeah, can you tell us generally about your research on digital content creators with migratory experience that are based in Germany? Maybe firstly, indeed, you can explain the term migratory experience, which we presume anyway is the sort of the English translation of the term “mit Migrationshintergrund”. Yes Fergal, first of all, thank you very much that I can share this podcast with you today. And thank you for the invitation of sharing a little bit of my new ongoing research with you. And yes, you said correctly in Germany, we have this term “mit Migrationshintergrund”. So it literally would be like a migratory background. But I am using a different, slightly, term. I'm referring to migratory experience, because using this term migratory background has been highly criticized by some scholars. Some of them still use it, but some of us, some other scholars, decide to differentiate and separate from this term. So actually, this “Migrationshintergrund”, or this migratory background, was used to describe someone or a person who has at least one parent who was born without German citizenship. So, the term became officially established in the 2005 micro-census, and it was used for statistical reasons mostly. There's actually a very, very nice paper that explains kind of the history of it, and the author is Anne-Kathrin Will, it's open access, and you can Google it. , and then you can have a better explanation about this term. So, I prefer talking about experience, but... Because if we go into this migratory background, who has not a migratory background? There's a quote that I like very much from a migration scholar, Klaus Bade, that I always kind of use. He says something like, homosapiens are homo migrants. I mean, we are all somehow having this historic migratory background. So it's actually very critical just to use it as a label, because that is kind of the problem. It has been used as a label who is not really German, and who has always kind of this label that is as a marker, and is pretty much also... you know, it's making like a marker, you know, saying who is German and who is not, right? So a little bit of the context, and of course this is widely used, as I said, or it's the context in Germany, right? For maybe for the audience who is not really knowing this German context. So I decide to use experience because especially for the research on the content creators. I'm looking into mostly three content creators who identify themselves as migrants, two of them at least. And the third one mentions herself that she's a daughter of Vietnamese migrants. she was born in Germany, but she's constantly seen as different. So it's also a marker for othering. But I use experience because these three content creators talk about their own experiences, and they post about their experiences, and they share stories, they share points of view. They share, for instance, sketches, humorous sketches. Or Hong Lee, the one... daughter of a Vietnamese, she's an artist, so she creates comics, and she also gives a chance for others on their community to share their stories with her, and then she creates a comic on these experiences. So that's why I talk about experiences, but I also, of course, have this phenomenological link in how we experience and deal with everyday life. So that's why I, so to speak, rather use experience as... as a term, and not migratory background. Chapter 3: Interculturality as an Emerging Imaginary Okay, very, very interesting, Yolanda. And yeah, I think it's a term that has a lot of validity. And maybe hopefully, with the podcast, other people will start using the term as well. Your background is, of course, at least partly in intercultural communications. You very interestingly see interculturality as a type of emerging imaginary, linking here intercultural studies and social imaginary theory. And you've read a lot in relation to social imaginary theory. Can you tell us more about this, about the link that you create here, and the idea of interculturality as an emerging imaginary? come or we are related to the ideas of Jürgen Bolten from the University of Jena. And these ideas are also very linked to sociology of knowledge, right? So how the everyday life is like a paramount moment of experiences and how people automatically handle how we deal with the world, right? How we need to work in a routine manner to sort of come with all the things that one person needs to do in everyday life but also as a reduction of complexity. While we I mean it would be great that we reflect all the time and that we question everything, as I said, we kind of need to... Yeah, live in a practical matter, no? So from the sociology of knowledge, for instance, Berger and Luckmann come up with these theories in the 60s, how, for instance, the creation of an archive of knowledge creates this sort of common sense, in which I don't need to explain, for instance, what the red light on the street means, because we all know that it means stop, right? So this kind of, I mean, probably not everybody... Depends on the context. Exactly. I mean, even if you don't respect it, you know what it means. That you do it is another thing, but you kind of know what it is, no? Of course, it would be probably places that they use another light. I don't know. But I think it's a good example. So this is the idea of what is seen as take it for granted, as an unquestioned truth. And I think... Jürgen Bolten took also these ideas to approach culture, right? Culture as a creation or configuration of that what is seen as “normality”, what we don't question and what we do as a routine. So taking these theories, I start wondering what happens if I approach also culture and interculturality, but from the lens of the social imaginary, because I'm very fascinated, as you mentioned, from the theories of social imaginaries, mostly Cornelius Castoriadis, a Greek philosopher, in his theory, he also links some aspects of psychoanalysis and you could say sociology and it's quite complex. But the ideas that I took from there is how... In life, the imagination is there, the imaginary is there. And I already mentioned Klaus Bade with homo-sapiens, or homo-migrants. And we could also say we are also homo-imaginans. Imagination is also part of people, of the persons, not only in creativity and in imagining things, but also is what links a group of people. And you can say, OK, societies come together because of that, what is imagined as a link. And just to ask a small question, with imaginary here, you mean sort of the world that exists in our heads, basically, or how are we to see this in simple terms? Yeah, in simple terms, that's a good question. I mean, of course, you had imagination, what a person imagines, for instance. I mean, there's an example, “my imaginary friend”, that's something that you have, but imagination as a social factor. Imagination as, for instance, what a group of people would imagine there is life together. What component you give, for instance, to some mountain, living in a place where you have a mountain, or what value you give, what sort of meaning you give. I mean, imaginary as a web of meaning that orients and that gives you a sense of... an orientation, but also shapes the practices, shapes not only what you think, but also what you do. And I always have this example, what I call dominant imaginary, that could be also seen as a very close culture. That is, for instance, how we imagine, or how people imagine nations, for instance. And I don't mean here also to make general assumptions, but at least in Mexico, that's kind of my example. In Mexico, how you imagine Mexican culture is very, pretty much... linked the nation-state, and for that you have a flag with certain colors that have certain meanings and you have an eagle, for instance, if you see a Mexican flag, you see an eagle in the middle and that eagle has a story behind that. And we don't know if that story is true or not, I mean, probably there's research on that, but still we cannot assure that it's true. And the story, for instance, I don't mean to tell here the whole story, but the story kind of backs up And that is in some way how you create this meaning and how people decide or not. if they believe it or not, and this is one way, for instance, how to see dominant imaginaries that shape cultures, cultures that are, as Bolten would say, structured, right? More structured. And then an emerging imaginary is basically an imaginary which hasn't become dominant yet and exists parallel to the dominant imaginary, or can exist parallel to the dominant imaginary? Yeah, I think they exist parallel and I think they exist in a sort of, I don't know if I put it as a conflict zone, but as a, you know, there's an ongoing dynamic which I mentioned between emergent and dominant imaginaries, not to see it just as a dichotomy, but they are kind of in a fuzzy way. Okay, there's a more sort of complex interrelation between different types of imaginaries. I would say, and there's not just only one imaginary, but many. And the idea here, and also one very appealing idea of Castoriadis, is that through imagination we can also change things. We can change established dominant truth, we can establish things that are not working and we can question. And that's why he talked about the radical imaginary as an emergent form. How, for instance, through the imagination of one person, probably you can create a movement, right, and then create, I don't know if you think in activism, how you can create something, but the the question is if that would come one day as a dominant through. Is that connected with interculturality? the attempt that I have come to see culture and interculturality with the lens of the social imaginaries. Trying to find parallels and and try to put into discussion. For instance these ideas of Castoriades with Bolten with Berger and Luckmann and I see there's this link of interculturality as this emergent opportunity to create something new isn't it? And for instance Catherine Walsh, also more from a decolonial perspective, she says that interculturality can be seen as a decolonial practice where you have the chance to question and really reconfigure new ways and and that's kind of the yeah, parallel that I that I see between this this forms Chapter 4: The E-maginary And if we think of the digital yeah the digital opens up also more spaces to express but also more spaces for inspiration Yes, I came up with this idea of the E-maginary, like you mentioned with the E clarifying this digital aspect or this electronic aspect, and that idea came as an inspiration from Alberto Romele. He talks about the e-magination, not the imaginary, but the imagination, and he thinks, or he sees also this. and productive imagination that also, you know, algorithms and all these machines have. He talks about the electronic or digital imagination. So I got inspired by him and I thought, okay, if we think in this post-digital times, where we have this continuity between this online and this offline, they're not seen as separated. You have also worked a lot on this topic. If we see this, how we can think about the E-maginary as something that is also intertwined and embedded within this post-digitality. So if we look at, let's say, social media, that is what I do, you see dominant imaginaries there that reflect, of course, practices and ideas. Let's put it now just for explanation terms, in the offline, you see it also in the online. But you see that in the online, you also see reconfiguration of meaning that also has an impact on the offline. So you see that the connection, and that is one aspect that you can see how emergent imaginaries probably could take place in this space, right? It is again in a conflict because you can also see that in online spaces, you see that reproduction of dominant imaginaries. You see that with radicalization and depending on the content, of course, right? But you see, I see also... the E-maginary, the emergent E-maginaries as a way that hopefully one day will become dominant, right? The important I think is that they are there, they could be more, I mean content that is questioning for instance is there and could be probably more visible or could be that it reaches other populations that probably wouldn't have access to that. But still it's an ongoing conflictive dynamic. You said hopefully this emergent E-maginary will become true, but what are you thinking about? Because I mean what are these emergent E-maginaries and are they all good and we should all hope that they will become real? Or what were you thinking about? Yeah, here I'm thinking specifically of examples again related to... my research on digital content creators. For instance, people that I follow and that I try to take as part of my research. For instance, there's trans woman. shares a lot of her thoughts. Thoughts on identity, thoughts on I don’t know wars, geopolitical aspects, right? And she has a lot of reach. Maybe she gets a lot of hate from people that disagree with her, but at least she's being part of the conversation and she's there. And probably we wouldn't see that... person on TV or you know, and she has found her a spot. I don't know how really how many people is seeing this content. But at least she also has, as I said, haters that are not agreeing with her. And at least is there and is starting the conversation. And that, for instance, I think those sort of topics are not so visible. Or I can also tell you other example. There are families, for instance, posting content on their everyday life, but they're living with disabilities. So you can see how they manage things. And this is very banal content, but you can have access to that kind of realities that probably you wouldn't have if you don't know anyone. So it's connected to kind of the internet as a democratic space, and where also marginalized voices can emerge and are emerging, and can be more visible and. this sense, dominant in the sense that they will be known by more people. Yeah, consider in their own imagineries, consider these other E-magineries inside it. Yeah, yeah, sort of, yes. I mean, they always have been there now, but probably this kind of content was not the mainstream content, and it has been, as you correctly mentioned, marginalized. And now we can see it. As I said, I don't know really how many people are getting that. I'm getting that because the algorithm is showing me that, right? And I see the content and the comments, sorry, and at least it's new for some people. But the opposite is also true, isn't it? I mean, if the dominant imaginary is liberal social democracy, then you also have very dark, very far-right, emergent imaginaries, which are also sort of parallel imaginaries, which are deeply unpleasant. Totally, yeah. That's why I say it's everything. It's like a chaos there. It's a fusion of many. Chapter 5: German Windows and “German Stuff” Okay, so very good Yolanda, you talked there about some of the content providers or content creators or whoever you wanted to say that you have looked at more concretely. I know you talked in the presentation you presented at our conference about German windows and Lüften and how this relates to digital interculturality and digital content and so called “German stuff”, which was sort of humorous and interesting. Do you want to talk about the work that you've done and maybe how this relates to stereotypification and that sort of thing? Yes, for that presentation I focus on three content creators. I already told you I think Uyen Ninh she's a Vietnamese woman living in Germany and Visckel he's a Venezuelan guy living actually in Leipzig and Hong Lee, but Hong Lee is a bit more serious. So I think actually Uyen Ninh she went viral because of this video on on these German windows. And and you used to find a lot of experiences and videos about these German windows for audience that is not knowing why this German windows is a topic here and German windows, I don't know if in other countries, but at least in Mexico where I come from and I was socialized, we didn't have that sort of window. So you have this way of opening these windows and in German it's “kippen”, I don't know in English. Like you openit in a way that is just partly open and this is a shock. Also for me, dealing with this window that I didn't know the technique and all, you kind of have the feeling when you open it that you break it. And it seems like an expensive window. So it's like a shock. So it is very interesting how you see this content of this. I mean, it's funny, right? I mean, it's funny and you laugh and at least people who have made that experience relate to that. I related to that and of course I feel identified. And this is something that we can think of as something taken for granted, right? I mean, for people that know these windows, it's like it's a banal thing that has no meaning, right? I mean, it's just you open it and that's it, no? But for someone who's experienced something new, you experience a shock because you don't know, and then you laugh because you exactly know that feeling of having the fear to break that window. And this is considered like a “German thing” also because of this practice of letting fresh air into the apartment or the house where you live, no? This lüften, no? That probably, at least for me, coming from Mexico, where most of the time you have nice weather and probably a door is open or a window is open, it's part of... it's unnoticed because it's part of the everyday life. But here in Germany, where it's cold and you have another construction and isolation, then the air gets very thick and then you need to open the window more times. So this is a practice that Uyen, for instance, and Visckel they reflect on that and how for them it's new. And now you need to get new practices living in Germany because you need to, I don't know, use a heater, you know, open the window and things that they didn't do in Vietnam or in Venezuela, right? So this is a very banal example, but I think it illustrates exactly these taking for granted practices, this everyday life. and the experience of something new. And how also posting this kind of content creates some sort of commonality, what Felix Stalder talks about this, this commonality, this referentiality, and well, he also talks about the algorithmicity. But there we see this, how in this very good, quotidian aspect, you give some sort of meaning and then you, I mean, at least they question it in a very funny way as a “German stuff”, no? As a German stuff. And like this, you have many examples, no? Uyen, her kind of content is always comparing “German stuff” with Vietnamese stuff because the boyfriend is a German boyfriend and then she kinds of, I don't know, many, many things like that, the German bread and the food, no? And then of course you have the risk of coming into stereotypes. Because at the end, you're reproducing, again, closed understanding of culture, what is “Vietnamese”, what is “German”, that is also quite diverse, right? But you have this sort of reproduction of stereotypes. That, of course, is to see as problematic. However, I think in talking about their experiences, they do, at least, Uyen and Visckel, they do reflect on that. They do reflect on their own experience and how they see this thing. And I think that sort of smooths a little bit this way of stereotyping, at least from the content of that, too. Might be that there's other content creators that just reproduce, you know, and that could be very difficult. Sorry, but does the tone not also sort of counteract the stereotypification? Because, I mean, these things are done ironically and then, you know, they're pointing fun at these things. Yes, yes. It's funny content, right? And it's funny content also that reaches a lot of people, I think, because they also made it on traditional media, for instance, Uyen. And she has, I think, in YouTube she has three million followers and Instagram two million followers. And you also need to read the comments, how they see this, how they experience something other in another part of Vietnam and then they kind of also questions that probably is not all German, but it's in a part. I think she lives in Mannheim. So it's probably a practice that is so there, you know, and and they I mean there's still some kind of reflection there. I cannot say it takes all the place but I think it's something that we need to look upon or I'm I'm I'm exploring that you know to see to see precisely this ongoing dynamic between this culture and interculturality. Chapter 6: Influencers as Intercultural Trainers? So are they they’re intercultural trainers of the future? That's a provocative comment I did in the presentation. Because I think nowadays, when you want to know something about, probably if you're traveling to Vietnam, probably you will Google it. And nowadays, you will probably ask Chat GPT that explains you something about the place you're going. So we used to have, probably we still have them, these guidebooks, these intercultural training in books that are also, some of them, at least the ones I know, are also to see with some distance. And some of them might be problematic, because again, they reproduce this static, closed understanding of culture. Cultural standards and these aspects, and I think at least if you see this, if you Google it and then you probably come to YouTube and you show this, I mean you see this video of Uyen for instance, you might understand how certain things work in at least where she comes from in Vietnam. I don't know if they're going to be the future intercultural trainers but I think it is part of this current scenario where you have a lot of information and you choose what to take and probably, I hope, and here I'm also hoping, you can get a more differentiated and more plural at least a scenario of information not like in the 90s with just “the” guide that tells you how, I don't know, how a country works. I think it's going to be a combination of using this kind of content creators' videos or information and blogs, and I mean, okay, blogs are quite updated also. But probably you will have some sort of differentiated information on Internet, and as I said, people are using ChatGPT for such things, isn't it? It's interesting too, that if you think about ChatGPT and artificial intelligence, obviously won't be able to pick up on the ironic tone in which a lot of this content is meant in, and it will have sort of maybe sort of a flattening effect, which sucks out the humor from different things, which is maybe not all that obvious. Okay, continuing maybe to think about this and about possible Internet futures. What trends do you see actually in the logic of the Internet of the future? And I'm thinking here about the ideas that some people have about AI sort of flattening the Internet. And there are people who have argued that actually we live in sort of the end throes of the social media age and that AI is going to take over. Where do you sit in relation to this discussion? Those are very, of course, good questions. And here I can, of course, just guess. But I would guess that we would have, as I said... yeah, of getting some information. I don't think that social media will be over. I do think that, of course, it's changing. And it's also interesting that probably, I don't know if people are still posting like they used to, because now it's a lot of, you know. I think ideas of privacy are coming back, no? But I think as way of communicating in private forms, no? I think that's... that's very important and I don't think that will kind of disappear. I also think that many people are making a life out of yeah, trying to become influencers so yeah, probably we will see just social media as not just content creators influencers and advertisement and also have this example of these toys in Mexico, and they they produce some toys for sort of role play and now they they have also a toy besides being a doctor or secretary or a chemist they have a they have a Youtuber and you can I mean if you Google “Juguetes mi Alegría” you can see the youtuber. So I think that that is becoming a way of making a life. So I don't think that will disappear. I think it will it will live together with broader use of of artificial intelligence. As I said, having the app in your smartphone and asking everything to Chat GPT, becoming more normal. I would think it would all live together in, I don't know. Okay, so it's interesting. So what you're suggesting is that the internet will still be sort of a series of platforms, but some platforms will gain more importance and other platforms will maybe become less important, but still exist and still have their own audience. I think yes. And here I have another research that I'm doing, for instance, on Facebook. Facebook that is quite, I mean, probably is not so used anymore by some generations and this and that. But the private groups of Facebook are very important for at least Latin American migrant women that I'm also researching. There's really a very but this is private groups, right? And this is a very, very important channel to ask questions and to get some sort of community. Of course, you can ask a question to Chat GPT, but you won't get the solidarity there – you won’t get the irony – and the irony. That's why I don't think that it will change, because I'm seeing, at least for now, what I'm seeing in my research, I'm seeing these dynamics, so I don't think people will give up on that. I'm thinking of the imaginary friend you were talking about before. because I can imagine that there is not any more like just, you know, the Chat GPT platform and we are doing advertisements without the warning and the social media platform, whatever, but they will be more and more integrated. I can imagine an avatar who do, who works as influencer and I can imagine private group where there are many bots, which you know at the beginning that they are bot, but then you forget about that and then you feel very comfortable to chat with your e-maginary friend. So I can imagine that and also what I think it would be interesting is kind of maybe in relation to intercultural trainings and so on, because you say there is so much there, but it's not enough. So also and you were saying, yeah, who knows what is chosen there for videos there and the humor is a way so kind of a chatbot analyzing the web with a critical knowledge like the one we have, for example, other intercultural trainer and then selecting things and helping you. So maybe there will be we should create an avatar. Intercultural avatar trainer. So yeah, that was great, Yolanda. So thank you very much for coming and for taking part in our podcast. So if you'd like to learn more about ReDICo, then please go to redico.eu. You can also, of course, head to our YouTube channel to look at various presentations from our conferences, including Yolanda's, as well as educasts. You can also join the ReDICoHub at hub.redico .eu, which is also run by the Center for Digital Intercultural Studies. Yeah, and the ReDICo Hub is the platform for all of those who are interested in the topics from our podcasts and related and related content. So this platform is for scholars, but also for students and for those involved practically, such as as trainers, while they still exist, policymakers and and teachers. OK, and you can also follow ReDICo on Bluesky and Mastodon. And yeah, thank you very much. Thank you, Yolanda, also from my side. And thank you to everyone for listening to us.

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