Group items tagged

"Mediated representations of gender, ethnicity and migration play an increasingly important role in the way these categories are understood in the public sphere and the private realm. As media often intervene in processes of individual and institutional communication, they provide frameworks for the production and consumption of representations of these categories. Thus media - in their production, representations and consumption - need to be analysed, not only as reflections as pre-existing socio-political realities, but also as constitutive elements in the production of meanings of the self and the Other. This special issue includes a number of articles that examine the articulations of gendered ethnic identities and of gendered citizenship as these are shaped in media production, media representations and media consumption."

"This article argues that the status of migrant subjects is characterized by a loss of communication rights and locates the instances where this loss is most visible. It investigates the process of silencing and immobilization of migrants and the particular forms it takes for female migrants through the disenablement of communicative acts. In this process the detained migrant loses her status as an interlocutor, irrespectively of the instances and processes that allow her-or demand of her-to speak. The state of exceptionality assigned to detained migrants is supported in the criminalization of migration laws and securitization, which together with widespread policies of incarceration in the West have become the antipode of the fundamental principles of free movement and expression. Silence and immobilization constitute the 'standard' rather than exceptional conditions of people on the move that shadow them across every step of their way, geographically, politically, culturally, legislatively, socially."

"This article explores the ways in which social media was used by diasporic Iranians in the aftermath of the June 2009 Iranian presidential elections. With particular attention to global reactions to the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, the author considers how social networking sites such as Facebook create an "intimate public sphere," simultaneously facilitating and defanging collective activism through expressions of compassion for others."

"Beginning with a quirky example by Aris Fioretos, this essay considers the peripheral and unintended associations that accompany any act of reading. After some contextualization in genetic criticism and the thought of Maurice Blanchot, it contrasts two versions of what goes on unconsciously while reading a literary work. The first version follows the author's implicit directions; the second gives free rein to personal associations. It may seem that the second reader is missing the text's true meaning; however, these free-ranging associations are necessary in order to create any meaning at all, according to Daniel Dennett's "multiple-drafts" theory of consciousness. Whether we validate it or not, an obbligato of associations always accompanies our reading. Such an obbligato is not only necessary and useful in producing meaning; it is part of the pleasure of the text."

"Suspicion of reading as a lived experience is a consequence of the rhetorical success of a few key arguments that together have defined a critical landscape dominated by various forms of contextualism. Where the contextualist consensus prevails, reading is tacitly or explicitly regarded as an epiphenomenon, inasmuch as the real locus of meaning-creation is elsewhere. The essay analyzes three core contextualist doctrines (about consciousness, history, and the status of the subject) and argues that they need not delegitimate the experience of reading. Rather, in each case the defining assumptions and beliefs of contextualism require attention to reading in order to do their interpretive work. Giving reading its due may also have a corrective function to the extent that contradictions caused by its neglect have thwarted an understanding of issues such as the relation of form and history, the status of the aesthetic, and the disciplinary purpose of the lettered humanities. Recognizing reading as the hidden ground of our critical and theoretical activity can help get us past various conundrums, impasses, and dead ends that haunt our profession."

"Reflecting on the relation between the media ages of orality, writing, and digital networking, Liu asks the question: what happens today to the "sense of history" that was the glory of the high age of print? In particular, what does the age of social computing-social networking, blogs, Twitter, etc.-have in common with prior ages in which the experience of sociality was deeply vested in a shared sense of history? Liu focuses on a comparison of nineteenth-century historicism and contemporary Web 2.0, and concludes by touching on the RoSE Research-oriented Social Environment that the Transliteracies Project he directs has been building to model past bibliographical resources as a social network."

Fitna is a 2008 short film made by a Dutch member of parliament to support his fight against Islam. It shows shocking footage of terrorism, violence and women's oppression and claims that these are inherent to Islam. The film caused immense controversy and mobilized people across the world to produce and upload their own views to YouTube. In this article we analyze these videos using different theoretical models of democratic interaction, and distinguishing between antagonism, 'agonism' and dialogue. On the basis of a cybermetric network analysis we find that the videos are mostly isolated reactions to the film. Only 13 percent or fewer of the posters interacted with each other through comments, subscriptions or 'friendship'. These interactions could be qualified as antagonistic or agonistic, but very rarely involved dialogue. We therefore conclude that YouTube enabled a multiplication of views rather than an exchange or dialogue between them.

"Over the past three decades, scholars studying the phenomenon of political scandal have mostly based their works on the premise that scandals can only occur in liberal democracies. Contradictory to this assumption, however, some of the most heavily discussed phenomena in contemporary semi-authoritarian Russia are scandals emanating from the new, vibrant sphere of social media thriving on a largely unfiltered internet. How are these 'internet scandals' impacting politics in the semi-authoritarian political environment? To address this and related questions, I juxtapose two case studies of police corruption scandals that erupted in the social media sphere in 2009/2010. Drawing on the findings, I argue that Russia's ruling elites are presently very much capable of managing these outbursts of public outrage. Mainly with the help of the powerful state-controlled television, public anger is very swiftly redirected towards lower-level authorities and foreign, supposedly hostile powers."

"In their studies of online media, political economists of communication have examined how firms like Google enclose users in a web of commercial surveillance, thus facilitating the commodification of their online labor. However, this focus on enclosure tends to overlook the political possibilities highlighted by autonomist Marxist theory-namely, that users, under certain circumstances, can appropriate these applications to contest conditions of exploitation. This article offers an analysis of Blog Cabin 2008, a cable home improvement show, in order to explore this tension between autonomy and enclosure. Our findings suggest that producers indeed used the show's blog to exploit fans' free labor. However, fans also used the blog to form social bonds, to press demands on the show's producers, and to make connections between the show's class politics and the wider financial crisis. A concluding section explores the theoretical and political significance of such unanticipated uses of the show's blog."

"Research on social movement networks has been defined by an emphasis on structural determinism and quantitative methodologies, and has often overlooked the spatial dimension of networking practices. This article argues that scholars have much to gain if (1) they move beyond the understanding of networks as organisational and communication structures, and analyse them as everyday social processes of human negotiation and construction, and (2) they pay attention to how networks between different organisations create multiple and overlapping spaces of action and meaning that define the everyday contexts of social movements. Drawing on ethnographic research within the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, this article explores the everyday dimension of political and communication networks. It shows that everyday networking practices are embedded in processes of identification and meaning construction, and are defined by a politics of inclusion and exclusion; introducing the concept of ethnographic cartography, it demonstrates that social movement networks are incorporated into everyday practices and narratives of place-making."

"This paper aims to demonstrate how intersectionality provides an important conceptual tool to analyse practices of cultural production in ethnic minority media. In the context of the digital age, media are increasingly central as systems of representation of identity, culture and community. However, research examining how ethnic minority media become engaged in struggles of power is rare. Few works have paid attention to the ways in which race and gender operate in tandem to produce and maintain the unequal distribution of power in the mediascape of countries of post-colonial immigration. This paper juxtaposes gender studies and ethnic studies in order to analyse the representation of gender in ethnic media, with a particular focus on journalistic practices."

"This article examines the hybrid cultural geographies of indigenous video with Donna Haraway's visual strategy of diffraction. Drawing on ethnographic inquiry, one particular video is explored from three different perspectives. First, a festival audience celebrates how the video represents place-based belonging, the joys of collective labor, and indigeneity. Second, a geographical analysis articulates the transnational circuits of advocacy and collaborative practices of knowledge production that shaped this video and its subsequent travels. Third, an extended conversation with the video maker about his target audience reveals a political intervention not visible from the first two angles of analysis. When diffracted, this thrice-told story about one video provides lessons about the potential for indigenous video to decolonize scholarly authority."

This article investigates the complex relationship between digital media, religion, and politics in Egypt since the early 1990s. Charting the emergence of a new media landscape - one that is facilitated by technological innovations such as mobile telephony, high-speed Internet, and small digital cameras - this paper explores how a very strong Islamic revivalist trend is capitalizing on the power and reach of these new media practices in an effort to develop Islamically inflected models of citizenship. The paper argues that such a mediascape is contributing to the development of new models of nationalism and civic citizenship in Egypt - ones that are not orchestrated by the Egyptian State but are mediated through oppositional groups, mainly of the Islamist variety. The paper aims to chart a map of media practices in Egypt in the past two decades, and trace how these practices are informing the rise of new notions of citizenship, cultural policy, digital activism, and media consumption.

This paper uses Sayyid's concept of Eurocentrism to analyse neoconservative media discourse following the September 11 attacks. Using predicate analysis on articles from The Weekly Standard magazine, this study aims to determine how neoconservative writers created a Muslim subjectivity following the attacks in order to make certain courses of action appear necessary and inevitable. Four subject positions emerged from the analysis: passive Muslims, active Muslims, the passive West, and the active West. By containing and controlling the representation of 'Islam' and 'Muslims' through these binaries, neoconservatives endeavoured to stabilise the identities of the players in the 'war on terrorism', and in doing so, advanced a Eurocentric discourse that attempted to re-centre the West as the vehicle of human progress, with America as its natural leader. This paper concludes that basing the 'war on terror' entirely around identities effectively made Eurocentrism (and Islamism) self-reinforcing, as the successful restriction of identities precluded challenges to the neoconservative discourse from any position other than a 'Muslim' subjectivity.

This article analyzes how objects that are 'vessels of meaning' are involved in social interactions that create and maintain identity and community. Specifically, it examines the production and uses of chapbooks within poetry communities. Chapbooks are cheaply produced booklets of poetry that are distributed hand-to-hand rather than through institutionalized publication and distribution systems. The analysis draws from in-depth interviews with poets and ethnographic observation of literary events. By outlining the creation and deployment of chapbooks, a case is made for the centrality of material objects in constitutive social interactions. It is argued that material objects are both cultural products and cultural producers, not only because of their physical characteristics, but because of the ways in which they circulate.

In this article, I draw from ethnographic research conducted in Paris to analyze how new class competencies based on cultural capital in the form of the "authentically global" are acquired, wielded, and reproduced in a global network of web-based groups that organize offline, local events for "international people." Just as mass media such as radio, television, newsprint, and the novel have been implicated in the creation of national middle classes, new social media may be connected to the discursive production of a global middle class. Although the development of the national middle classes was key to the nation-building projects of modernity, the production of this global class is fundamental economically and culturally to expanding processes of neoliberal globalization.

In this paper, the author draws upon an examination of two apparently opposed cyborg locations and technologies to show how, in specific instances, globalization, technology, economics, culture and diasporas intersect. Such intersections produce very specific, situated contexts for productive labor forces to emerge at the interface of technologies 'old' and 'new'. These situated contexts place the individual in relation to market forces and community production logics through which labor and affect are placed in hierarchies of digital globalization. The author does this by looking at how the 'sari' is produced, marketed and worn in two 'cyborg' contexts. One of the cyborg locations this article explores is online, the other is offline. By juxtaposing these 'old' and 'new' contexts of production and marketing a sari the author hopes to allow for issues to be raised that otherwise would be invisible.

This article critically assesses the role and broader applications of a place-based moving image database and online catalogue in researching film and cities. Unlike the sprawling metropolises of Berlin, London or New York (the archetypical 'cinematic cities'), a medium-sized provincial city such as Liverpool offers a more localized urban landscape conducive to place-based studies of film. The form and structure of the database plays a crucial role in the mapping of historical film and urban geography, allowing for relational forms of spatial analysis. This prompts a wider set of questions: in what ways can the database inform and structure specific spatial narratives of the city over time? What, by extension, are the cultural and historiographical implications for research into film, place and space? Finally, to what extent might a database model of the 'city in film' be extended beyond local and regional boundaries to reshape national discourses of film historiography?

This essay supplements a growing body of work on domestic television in China by exploring some histories of the screen outside the home. Rooted in Olympic-era Beijing, this discussion converges around three intermedial contexts: (1) contemporary art and exhibition; (2) nondomestic and unhomely space; (3) contemporary cinema. These disparate assemblages reimagine the space of television and the medium's role as a form of social communication. The primary focus is the intersection of television and the city in articulating the social body in transition. Focusing on artists, audiences, state media, and elided spaces of electronics production, the essay develops the notion of "screen postsocialism" to explore the logic of development in contemporary China. In particular, it argues that the Olympic era consolidates a transitional imaginary around outside television forms. This emphasis on a particular technology of reception, moreover, acts to screen out the broader textures of postsocialist cultural and economic production.

A regular tourist destination since the early 1990s, Rocinha - the paradigmatic touristic favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - has seen the number of foreigners visitors grow considerably after the successful international release of City of God in 2003. In dialogue with the new mobilities paradigm and based on a socio-ethnographic investigation which examines how poverty-stricken and segregated areas are turned into tourist attractions, the article sheds lights on the ways tourists who have watched Fernando Meirelles's film re-interpret their notion of "the favela" after taking part in organized tours. The aim is to examine how far these reinterpretations, despite based on first-hand encounters, are related back to idealized notions that feed upon the cinematic favela of City of God while giving further legitimacy to it.