7th Annual Conference of the DGPuK Division Media Sports and Sports Communication

From September 18 to 20, the 7th annual conference of the DGPuK sdivision Media Sports and Sports Communication took place in Hamburg with strong participation from the ZeMKI. The event was organized at the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences by Prof. Dr. Thomas Horky and Prof. Dr. Andreas Hebbel-Seeger together with the group’s spokesperson team, JProf. Dr. Jessica Kunert and ZeMKI member Dr. Philip Sinner.

As part of the 5th workshop for early career researchers, the two MA Digital Media and Society students Büsra Asci and Berkay Canbuldu presented their thesis project on the Bundesliga and the Turkish Super League and their reception by the Turkish community in Germany. At the main conference, two graduates of the media and communication programs presented the results of their final theses, which were supervised by ZeMKI members Prof. Dr. Christian Schwarzenegger, Dr. Cornelia Driesen and Dr. Philip Sinner: Ole Alt dealt with basketball and the long-term mediatization tendencies in the easyCredit BBL. Jan Heydenreich analyzed the self-portrayal of German tennis players in social media during the Wimbledon Championships for the first time.

One of the highlights was the joint keynote speech by Prof. Dr. Siegfried Weischenberg (University of Hamburg) and close ZeMKI cooperation partner Prof. Dr. Wiebke Loosen (Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans Bredow Institute). Together they traced the arc from the beginnings of modern sports communication research to brand new results from the Worlds of Journalism Study. Dr. Philip Sinner was represented in the program with two presentations: Together with Judith Brand (FH Upper Austria), he presented the results of a study on the Google Pixel Women’s Bundesliga, which included an analysis of the clubs’ communicative practices and a survey of their media managers. The second presentation, together with Thomas Neumann and Dr. Jörg-Uwe Nieland (AAU Klagenfurt), expanded the communicative figuration of mediatized leisure sports to include the perspective of commercial fitness centers in comparison to public welfare-oriented sports clubs.

The academic programme was rounded off by a get-together at or better on the Außenalster together with Hochschulsport Hamburg, a panel discussion on the mediatization of sport using the example of the Baller League in the Xing New Work Pier and a presentation by Carsten Nillies on the Rhine-Ruhr 2025 FISU World University Games.

Link to the conference homepage

Link to the complete conference program