Josef Wukovits

In 1978, I completed my degree in communications engineering at the Technical University of Vienna and worked for an international telecommunications company. In 2002, I took a six-month sabbatical and managed a project for Doctors Without Borders in South Sudan as a logistician and administrator. This sparked my interest in social science and history. After my retirement in 2010, I studied ‘Cultural and Social Anthropology’ at the University of Vienna and did research for my master's thesis on the influence of tourism concepts on traditional healing rituals in Namibia. My interest in contemporary history finally led me to the master's programme in ‘Contemporary History and Media’. In my master's thesis, I examined the reporting of the Burgenland party newspapers on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Research interests: Media processing of a contemporary historical event. The media thereby gain interpretative authority over events. But what reality do the media convey? Constructivism, framing, influence on media consumers.

Current research project: My research topic touches on both components: Contemporary history and the media. It is about the media processing of a contemporary historical event, specifically the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 as a “journalistic” event. At which points and on the basis of which events can caesuras be identified in the reporting of the two party newspapers of the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ), the Österreichische Volksstimme and the Freie Burgenland, on the Hungarian uprising of 1956? Can internal party differences be identified in connection with these events and are these differences visible to the outside world in the reporting of the party organs? Can caesuras be attributed to specific members of the editorial staff?