How Global Iconic Events Are Born — Interview With Julia Sonnevend

In this episode of the Media & Change podcast series Julia Sonnevend, assistant professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan, and non-resident fellow of our Center talks about the themes of her recent book published by Oxford University Press: Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event. Julia discusses how the act of storytelling works in the case of global iconic events, and how the media coverage and social construction of events such as the fall of the Berlin wall serve as social myths and narratives around history. Julia talks about how it is inevitable that the media condenses and at the same time distorts events into decodable universal narratives, and how recent retellings of the fall of the Berlin wall rely on the myth of the fall of the Berlin wall.

Listen to the podcast here: https://podcasts.ceu.edu/content/how-global-iconic-events-are-born