This profile was originally published in Research Matters.
Media sociologist Julia Sonnevend begins her first book, Stories Without Borders (Oxford), with a provocative opening salvo.
“There was no Berlin Wall,” she writes, “and it never fell.”
Sonnevend, who joins the Department of Sociology at The New School for Social Research this summer, spends the remainder of the book elaborating on the significance of this assertion. In the process, Stories Without Borders contributes to our understanding of how the meaning of events evolves alongside their symbolic representation. Using the fall of the Berlin Wall as a case study, Sonnevend proposes aspects of what she calls “global iconic events.” From there, she analyzes the factors — many of them related to media reportage and representation — that contribute to the transformation of certain events into enduring and compelling stories.
“If you want an event to be remembered over time,” she explained, “you have to turn it into a simple, condensed, universalized myth.”
In the case of the Berlin Wall, mythology elides the complex bureaucratic processes, political maneuvering, tense meetings, and delicate deal-making involved in negotiating the opening of the East German border. As Sonnevend put it, we instead tell each other “a mythical story about the Wall: that it just magically came down. We remember a quick, split-second event, when ordinary people had the power and determination to overcome a seeming permanent division.”
This willingness to neglect the facts of an event's complicated history in favor of an enchanting (though less accurate) story represents a non-rational element of human behavior that ties together multiple strands in Sonnevend's research. “I'm interested in the idea that we might be far less rational — far less fact-oriented — than we might imagine ourselves to be,” she said.
Her latest work deals with the concept of charm, which she says has long proven an elusive topic despite its pervasiveness in social life, and which can produce similarly non-rational social responses. “We all know charming people,” she said. “It's a quality that's very important in everyday interactions. But it's very hard to measure, and very hard to describe.”
According to Sonnevend, scholars in fields like international relations have previously asked what it means to have a charming leader, and have long used — alongside journalists — phrases like “charm offensive” to describe diplomatic interactions. Sonnevend explained that she is interested in examining media representations of charm in international relations contexts, but she also wants to understand charm's everyday social manifestations. At the heart of her current work lie questions about how charm influences individuals, how it differs from charisma, and how it can convince individuals to act in non-rational ways.
Sonnevend arrives at The New School for Social Research from the University of Michigan. She received her doctorate in Communications from Columbia University and previously completed a Master of Laws (LLM) degree at Yale Law School, as well as a JD and MA in German Studies and Aesthetics at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Originally from Hungary, Sonnevend brings to the Sociology department a breadth of research interests in the sociology of media and a passion for working across disciplinary lines and in different genres of scholarly production. She has already contributed a piece on contemporary borders to Public Seminar.
“Contemporary academia is often very siloed in terms of departments and disciplines,” Sonnevend said, adding that the particular interdisciplinary quality of scholarship at The New School for Social Research was part of what attracted her. Similarly important was NSSR's progressive history and its openness to active faculty participation in public debate. “I see myself as a combination of an academic and a public intellectual or essayist,” Sonnevend said, “And it seems to me that one can play those roles here at The New School. I am also very much looking forward to contributing to the Journalism + Design program at Eugene Lang College.”
In the 2017-2018 academic year, Sonnevend co-taught a graduate course on media and micropolitics with Jeffrey Goldfarb, the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology. She also offered an undergraduate course on “visual media and society.” She says that she is excited to teach students interested in media and communication across The New School's divisions.
Photograph credit: István Huszti (Index)