„Why Zak Kostopoulos had to die twice?”
For his completion thesis, one of my students chose to work on the media analysis around the murder of Zak Kostopoulos, a gay activist in Athens. This essay is how students work transform our thinking and contributes to our intellectual development.
When I have many things to finish over the week, I make a list of A and B on a piece of paper. A list means the things that are urgent, B list means I can take my time and finish it within one week. The C list is the list for items that need more time, like I can finish them within a month. There is one exception to the A-B-C lists, students’ papers, especially students theses take priority. They are the desert of my lists, I put them at the top of my to-do pile. I learn so much in reading student papers and theses.
Our students, most of them are top students from very good high schools all over Germany. Some of them could have possibly studied medicine with such high grades, but many decided to study social sciences for a reason, they are socially and politically interested. They are very articulate, very quick to come up with answers, critical questions, they are on top of the recent news most of the time. They have the whole world at the tip of their fingers through their cell phones and laptops. I cannot just say some nonsense on the lecture hall or seminar room, I have to read it carefully, I have to reflect, I have to see if there is anything new written on the subject and incorporate it in my lecture. But each time, one student after the lecture come up with a scholar I have not yet read, writes down the name for me, and they are ready to discuss it next week in the class.
The Erasmus and international students who are coming with this exchange program to Berlin are also going through several selection periods and interviews in their home universities. They bring new ideas from their own countries, but also new discussions and new scholarly perspectives. Specifically these students bring new ideas to the seminar rooms and lecture halls, which are in local discussions in Europe but not present in the German mainstream public discussions. I learn about post-colonial statues in Copenhagen (for example Queen Mary statue was a student presentation last year), women’s political movement in Pakistan, anemic suicide by self-immolation among Kurdish women in Iraq, a cultural analysis of Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of Future when it was first published in French, some of the student topics, which came to my desk for the first time with students’ writings. The students also bring new ideas for methods, combining media analyses with fieldwork and interviews, creatively using online videos as bases for interviews, or visual material (or “photo-voice”) as sociological data.
This week, one of my students’ short paper is on my desk. It is painful to look at the title: “The discursive framing of a modern-day lynching: Why Zak Kostopoulos had to die twice”. It is about the murder of gay activist Zak Kostopoulos in Athens in 2018 and how the Greek media responded to this murder. In this short reflection, I read a critical discussion of political power shifts in Greece by focusing on the LGBTQI movements. The student wants to use Ruth Wodak’s critical discourse analysis in order to weigh different political discussions to the murder but also expose the anti-gay rhetoric of the far right in Greek politics. But I also read a young Greek student’s pain in trying to analyze the far-right rhetoric in Greece and the shifting of media discourses to legitimize such discourses. Saying “this is not merely a result of rush of blood,” they are referring to how far-right discourses are anchored in Greece, and transforming social dynamics in Greece, a country of harsh economic problems, “austerity regimes”, keeping the gates of the EU by placing the refugees and immigrants in “hot spots” as well as social and cultural changes that target gender and sexuality norms of Greek society in such a critical context. This student’s short paper cries out all the dynamics of this critical transformation in this context within five pages.
I am sitting in front of my computer, googling the references, and try to catch a glimpse of the chronological development of the events that led to Zak Kostopoulos murder in order to better understand their work. As a university professor, I see this as a development of my intellectual development and expansion of my political horizon. Every time I climb the stairs of our Institute’s building, I remind myself how blessed I am to teach these students.
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Short note: Obviously I am not a specialist in Greek politics. But in their brilliant analysis in their book on the „Golden Dawn“, Sophia Vasilopoulou and Daphne Halikiopoulou the Golden dawn’s ‘nationalist solution’: explaining the rise of the far right in Greece (2015) analyzed the crisis of the nation-state in Greece with its internal dynamics which unsettled this society in the last decades.