12/12/2025
Congratulations to our former DAAD Lektor Björn Kasper, whose first book „Freiheit“ in Musikvideos und YouTube-Kommentaren - Eine kulturwissenschaftliche Deutungsmusteranalyse im Fach Deutsch als Fremdsprache has just been published (open access):
https://www.nomos-shop.de/de/p/freiheit-in-musikvideos-und-youtube-kommentaren-gr-978-3-7560-1877-2
Freiheit“ in Musikvideos und YouTube-Kommentaren explores how the highly contested cultural value of freedom is articulated, negotiated, and recontextualized in German-language music videos and more than 36,000 YouTube comments. Combining multimodal metaphor analysis, discourse-analytic approaches to topoi, and a cultural-studies-based interpretation pattern analysis, the book develops an innovative framework for analysing digital cultural data across modes and platforms.
Building on long-standing interpretive traditions of freedom, the study reconstructs a dense network of metaphors and topoi that shape contemporary understandings of freedom—ranging from emotional and existential dimensions to identity discourses, ideological framings, and political conflicts. The analysis demonstrates how music videos function as discursive artefacts that condense, reinforce, or contest social meanings, while online comments dynamically reframe these meanings in response to current events.
The monograph highlights music videos as an underexplored yet powerful resource for cultural learning, multimodal literacy, and foreign language education.
Eine Fallstudie untersucht im Rahmen einer kritisch multimodalen Diskursanalyse tradierte Wissensbestände und Neudeutungen von Freiheit – ein Beitrag für ein Fach, das sich gegenwärtig mit Wertevermittlung in der Unterrichtspraxis und kritischerer Ausrich
