Tim Markham | Birkbeck College, University of London (original) (raw)

Books by Tim Markham

This book takes aim squarely at the prevailing conventional wisdom that the encroaching pervasive... more This book takes aim squarely at the prevailing conventional wisdom that the encroaching pervasiveness of digital media in our everyday lives is undermining core notions of politics and ethics. Its principal claim is simple: instead of ethical and political principles enduring in spite of the myriad distractions of digital life, such principles are constituted precisely through those distractions. That word constitutive is key, and it’s inspired by Martin Heidegger, who argued that we have to take what we think of as inauthentic ways of being – idle talk and curiosity in his case, meandering about online seeking out diversion and affect in ours – as being just as ontologically foundational as anything else.

The other pivotal concept taken from Heidegger is thrownness. By this he means that there are no original selves full of identity and principle that we then go out and express in the world. All we have are the selves we constantly find ourselves thrown into, already acting in the thick of it. That can sound like fatalism, as though we just have to accept what we find ourselves doing in whatever world we’re thrown into, but we’re also hardwired to make that world familiar and to take responsibility for that self. Likewise, it can sound like the past doesn’t matter, only the now, which would make it difficult to criticise the way our world is rapidly changing. But the past is always part of our experience of the present, just not as an origin from which we’ve departed (and by implication to which we should seek to return) and instead as a moving, shifting entity that can’t be pinned down in time and space.

These references indicate that the book takes its cue from phenomenological philosophy, and it also draws on Sartre, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty as well as more contemporary theorists such as de Certeau, Butler and Chouliaraki. But this isn’t philosophical inquiry for its own sake – it’s a way of upending contemporary ways of thinking about digital media. We worry that while we’re better connected than ever our relations with mediated others are ersatz or virtue-signalling – but what if fleeting, ephemeral engagement is a better way of understanding our co-existence with others than deep reflection? Similarly, we fret that surveillance and data mining are fundamentally eroding ethical principles like autonomy and privacy – but what if there is no prior self to be defended against external forces? We express concern that the rise of identity politics has led to a new politics in which how people feel trumps all other reasoning – but what if the way someone feels isn’t seen as individualistic and reductive, but pre-individual, collective and thus political?

The truth is that cultural critics place too much emphasis on the forces that shape our digital encounters with the world, and not nearly enough on the affordances of these mundane happenings. The failure to recognise the full horror of suffering witnessed on the run is not a failure of self, and nor is each instance of data mining a threat to the integrity of our very selves. The spontaneous, fickle and fissiparous formation of interest groups online might lack the dedication and determination of seriously minded political activism, and might seem driven more by the experience than outcome of engagement, but the things that emerge out of these digital constellations are no less political. Political principles are not internal qualities, hard won and carefully honed, that we go about applying to the world as we find it; principles only come into existence as we go about acting, more often than not improvisationally and almost always provisionally. The whole point of living an ethical life is about what becomes of the ways we live in motion, grasping at knowledge and experience as we go, not randomly but rhythmically, drawing on collective repertoires that are of the world rather than us. This, finally, is what allows us to see that the ordinary stuff we get up to in our mundane digital existences is pregnant with the political.

Conexión pública: prácticas cívicas y uso de medios en cinco países, 2017

Mucho se ha escrito acerca de la importancia de los medios y sus contenidos informativos para la ... more Mucho se ha escrito acerca de la importancia de los medios y sus contenidos informativos para la participación cívica de la sociedad. No obstante muy pocas veces se ha tratado de esclarecer de manera puntual como opera esta supuesta conexión en la vida cotidiana. Los trabajos de este libro reúnen precisamente una serie de experiencias concretas en cinco países sobre las formas en que las personas en su vida diaria se aproximan y apropian de diversos asuntos de interés general de los que no solo opinan e intercambian formas en la vida pública. Ello permite mostrar que las concepciones tradicionales de participación política así como sus formas tradicionales de medirlas quizá requieran importantes revisiones en contextos definidos por la interconectividad, la difusión de fronteras entre lo público y lo privado y puestas en entre dicho de la verdad. Esta obra explora estas nuevas posibilidades a partir de métodos de investigación innovadores y originales congruentes con realidades más complejas, fluidas y cambiantes.

This book comes out of ten years’ experience teaching the same first-year undergraduate media the... more This book comes out of ten years’ experience teaching the same first-year undergraduate media theory course, trying out different texts each time, and finding that students consistently fail to engage with certain themes, as well as being resistant to the analytical orientation to the media that dominates the literature in this field. This isn’t because the students are incapable, but because they just don’t share some of the core assumptions that pervade media studies. One of these is the Frankfurt School-inspired premise that the media sits at the centre of our society, acting as a kind of cultural machine that reproduces dominant ideas and ideologies as well as coercive relations of power. Jettisoning the Frankfurt School entirely would be counter-productive, but a properly critical discussion of cultural reproduction needs to take into account the idea that few people working in the media industries wake up with a burning desire to entrench social norms and hierarchies of power.

Another assumption it challenges is that there’s something profound, and potentially pathological, about new or digital media – indeed, even using the terms ‘new’ and ‘digital’ now feels anachronistic. There are other disjunctures too: the idea that electoral politics is or should be at the heart of society, that the public/private distinction is meaningful and worth defending, that there are certain kinds of events and phenomena that we should pay attention to, collectively. The book responds not by dismissing politics or power, privacy or news, but by setting out how they and other cultural forces are experienced at the level of everyday life – rather than in the canonical form through which they are conventionally presented.

It bears emphasising that ‘everyday life’ does not indicate an uncritical descriptive account of what people do with media these days. The approach taken is phenomenological – not that I ever use the word explicitly. It means that each chapter takes a set of media practices, or forms, or institutions, and asks how they come to be experienced primarily as normal, even unremarkable, with scholarly explanations ranging from the political and economic to the cultural and arbitrary. It is thoroughly interdisciplinary in its approach, drawing on sociology, political science and philosophy as well as media theory – though it does so only insofar as such perspectives are useful, and straightforwardly explicable to students at the undergraduate level.

The focus in each chapter on the experience of everyday life is not about me putting forward a narrow yet insightful academic perspective on media, nor is it a craven attempt to appear relevant to students. Instead, it’s a heuristic device which allows us to identify what practices now count as normal across all aspects of our mediated lives, then to take a breath and ask how we got here and with what implications. It’s also a way of showing that what students often regard as the drier aspects of studying media – its institutions and regulation, for instance – aren’t external entities that need to be studied because that’s what media students do, but lived aspects of contemporary societies: think of how deeply entwined practical realities like media law, market research and human resources regulations are with our internalised notions of gender. The aim is to establish a critical break with the way we usually experience media as given, to take a step back and ask challenging questions about what underpins that experience, and to set out the full range of academic perspectives available to begin to answer those questions.

Full details here: https://he.palgrave.com/page/detail/media-and-everyday-life-tim-markham/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137477187

Scholars have long fretted about the gulf that exists between the enormity of historical change a... more Scholars have long fretted about the gulf that exists between the enormity of historical change and the banality of people’s everyday lives. This is said to be exacerbated in our media saturated age, immersed as we have become in an endless stream of sensations and distractions. In response, media theorists and practitioners alike try to come up with new ways of breaking through people’s complacency and waking them up to the reality or what’s going on out there. Drawing on both philosophy and an investigation of journalists living through historic times in the Middle East, this book takes aim at that conventional wisdom and opens up new ways of thinking about media and the way we all experience change. For politics, journalism, activism and humanitarianism, the upshot is that we shouldn’t be trying to provoke moments of revelation amongst publics and audiences, but to understand what is really at stake in the way the present endlessly unfolds in everyday life.

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"The Arab uprisings, as well as the tumultuous political upheavals that have occurred since, suggest that we live not only in a world of crises but one that is undergoing profound transformations. Tim Markham’s distinctive book thoughtfully encourages us to approach and understand this same world as lived, communicated and experienced in the everyday. He has written no less than a phenomenology of the political at once timely, eloquent and insightful. Recommended."
- Simon Cottle, Professor of Media and Communications at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University

"Tim Markham explores how and why people navigate the world in relation to everyday experiences of modern media. Delving into the news reportage of the ‘Arab spring’ uprisings, he recasts familiar concepts - such as identity, cultural value, citizenship, engagement and trust - to secure an alternative basis for theory-building. This is a perceptive, challenging and at times provocative study, one certain to prompt fresh, counter-intuitive thinking about journalism’s responsibilities in public life."
- Stuart Allan, Professor and Head of the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University

"At the time in which political life has become increasingly volatile and polarised there is so much at stake in the future of journalism and media. Political upheavals in the Middle East in particular are played out across a number of media platforms, highlighting frustrations and aspirations of millions of people demanding to be heard and calling for change. Tim Markham opens out this fiield and critically examines the conflicting, contradictory, micro impulses that stimulate and constrain media production and consumption in the region. In contrast to some of the celebratory accounts of the role of social media as the agent of change, this book anchors media in a much broader context of everyday capitalism."
- Gholam Khiabany, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths University of London

Journal articles and book chapters by Tim Markham

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019

In recent media and political theory the idea of affective solidarity has been treated as a contr... more In recent media and political theory the idea of affective solidarity has been treated as a contradiction in terms. Any relation to the other consisting in sympathy or pity cannot form the basis of full subjective recognition of the other, and in practice is often actively dehumanising. Further, there remains the notion that solidarity is contingent upon a rupture of habitual being-in-the-world that produces a revelatory consciousness of the subjectivity of the other. In journalistic contexts this leads to practices that aim at intensive or extensive encounters that transcend the affective livedness of everyday routines. Against these conventional wisdoms, this article argues that solidarity with distant others is not clinched in spite of the merely felt experience of the other in everyday life-an experience characterised by distraction, ambivalence and unreflexive sentimentality-but instead is predicated precisely on that mere feltness. Drawing on Heidegger's notion of findingness, Withy's disclosive postures and Levinas's ascription of ethics to the fundamental priority of coexistence , it is proposed that feeling the right way about distant suffering may be immaterial. In practical terms, it concludes with a call to shift our empirical focus away from the question of how media can produce meaningfully solidaristic encounters between distant others, to ask instead what kinds of ordinary mediated affect already existing in the world might afford solidarity.

Hodgson, Guy (ed.) (2017) Conflict, Trauma and the Media: A Collection of Essays. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing., 2017

There is a consensus in the academic literature that Western audiences are disengaged from the hu... more There is a consensus in the academic literature that Western audiences are disengaged from the human trauma they encounter in their everyday media use. Whether this is a product of the commercialisation of news or mediation itself is debated, but it is broadly agreed that ordinary people do not care as much as they should about faraway victims of conflict, war and injustice. Ongoing research investigates what can be done to reconnect audiences, which in theoretical terms hinges on the recognition of the full subjectivity of distant others. In particular, recent theorisations of violence drawing on Charles Taylor and ultimately Adam Smith have emphasised the role that imagination might play in fostering understanding of the subjective experience of conflict. In contrast, this paper contends that both the pathologisation of audience responses to mediated conflict and the remedies intended to shake people out of their indifference rest on a misconception of how the recognition of other subjectivities plays out in quotidian life. It does so by way of an investigation of the experience of media practitioners who self-evidently do care about others: journalists and media activists in Beirut, Lebanon, whose work focuses inter alia on the casualties and refugees of the war in neighbouring Syria. Seen at the level of the everyday, this experience can be similarly lacking in revelation, but its meaningfulness is not undermined by its banalities. The paper concludes that the dearth of intense moments of subjective recognition in ordinary contexts of media consumption is both rational and ethically defensible.

Books reviewed: Lina Dencik and Oliver Leistert (eds), Critical Perspectives on Social Media and... more Books reviewed:

Lina Dencik and Oliver Leistert (eds), Critical Perspectives on Social Media and Protest: Between Control and Emancipation. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs (eds), Social Media, Politics and the State: Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime and Policing in the Age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2015.
Julie Uldam and Anne Vestergaard (eds), Civic Engagement and Social Media: Political Participation Beyond Protest. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Gianpietro Mazzoleni (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Political Communication, First Edition. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015

Public connection refers to an orientation on the part of citizens toward an arena in which issue... more Public connection refers to an orientation on the part of citizens toward an arena in which issues of shared concern are deliberated and potentially resolved. It differs from political interest in that it does not presume that that to which individuals collectively attend is narrowly political in content, although not allowing that anything collectively attended to can form the basis of a deliberative space. Public connection further differs from public engagement in that it does not presume that the quality of connection is stable and substantive, nor that its experience is rewarding and empowering. Public connection is a heuristic rather than normative term, whose presence or absence can be empirically ascertained.

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2014

This article sounds a cautionary note about the instrumental use of celebrity advocacy to (re)eng... more This article sounds a cautionary note about the instrumental use of celebrity advocacy to (re)engage audiences in public life. It begins by setting out the steps necessary to achieve public recognition of a social problem requiring a response. It then presents empirical evidence which suggests that those most interested in celebrity, while also paying attention to the main stories of the day, are also least likely to participate in any form of politics. However, this does not rule out the possibility of forging a link between celebrity and public engagement, raising questions about what would potentially sustain such an articulation. After discussing the broader cultural context of celebrity advocacy in which perceived authenticity functions valorised form of symbolic capital, the article outlines a phenomenological approach to understanding the uses audiences make of celebrity advocacy, using the example of a Ewan McGregor UNICEF appeal for illustration. It concludes that while media encounters with celebrities can underpin a viewer’s sense of self, this is as likely to lead to the rationalisation of inaction as a positive response to a charity appeal.

This article explores the possibility of journalists acting as custodians of critical engagement,... more This article explores the possibility of journalists acting as custodians of critical engagement, drawing on Rancière’s conception of dissensus as organized disagreement over the conditions of understanding. It begins by assessing the status that worthiness and naiveté have as negative symbolic capital in the journalistic field, before asking whether journalists’ ambivalent detachment from the objects of their inquiry hinders their ability to engage critically with experts in other fields. It argues that journalism’s role in marshaling dissensus amounts to making clear the limits and absences of intelligibility in journalism and other fields, in distinction to disseminating knowledge as such.

Media, Culture & Society 36(1): 89-104, 2014

This article draws on phenomenological perspectives to present a case against resisting the objec... more This article draws on phenomenological perspectives to present a case against resisting the objectification of cultures of protest and dissent. The generative, self-organizing properties of protest cultures, especially as mobilized through social media, are frequently argued to elude both authoritarian political structures and academic discourse, leading to new political subjectivities or ‘imaginaries’. Stemming from a normative commitment not to over-determine such nascent subjectivities, this view has taken on a heightened resonance in relation to the recent popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. The article argues that this view is based on an invalid assumption that authentic political subjectivities and cultures naturally emerge from an absence of constraint, whether political, journalistic or academic. The valorisation of amorphousness in protest cultures and social media enables affective and political projection, but overlooks politics in its institutional, professional and procedural forms.

This article starts from the premise that recognition of professional authority and celebrity sta... more This article starts from the premise that recognition of professional authority and celebrity status depends on the embodiment and performance of field-specific dispositional practices: there’s no such thing as a natural, though we often talk about journalistic instinct as something someone simply has or doesn’t have. Next, we have little control over how we are perceived by peers and publics, and what we think are active positioning or subjectifying practices are in fact, after Bourdieu, revelations of already-determined delegation. The upshot is that two journalists can arrive at diametrically opposed judgements on the basis of observation of the same actions of a colleague, and as individuals we are blithely hypocritical in forming (or reciting) evaluations of the professional identity of celebrities. Nowhere is this starker than in the discourse of age-appropriate behaviour, which this paper addresses using the examples of ‘star’ war reporters John Simpson, Kate Adie and Martin Bell. A certain rough-around-the-edges irreverence is central to dispositional authenticity amongst war correspondents, and for ageing hacks this incorporates gendered attitudes to sex and alcohol as well as indifference to protocol. And yet perceived age-inappropriate sexual behaviour is also used to undermine professional integrity, and the paper ends by outlining the phenomenological context that makes possible this effortless switching between amoral and moralising recognition by peers and audiences alike.

Donald Matheson (2003) writes of war correspondents ‘scowling at their notebooks’, and this is no... more Donald Matheson (2003) writes of war correspondents ‘scowling at their notebooks’, and this is not meant as caricature but the corporeal expression of an epistemological orientation to the world in which facts have to be wrestled into submission. This article takes a phenomenological approach to ask whether there is a distinct orientation of citizen journalism and blogging, exploring the corporeal, temporal and spatial aspects of non-professional practices of media production. Hunching over a laptop suggests an epistemology in which facts and opinions are urgent and potentially subversive, though it is also tied to the romanticised individualism with which citizen journalism in particular is associated.

This article begins with the assertion that creativity in journalism has moved from being a matte... more This article begins with the assertion that creativity in journalism has moved from being a matter of guile and ingenuity to being about expressiveness, and that this reflects a broader cultural shift from professional expertise to the authenticity of personal expression as dominant modes of valorization. It then seeks to unpack the normative baggage that underpins the case for creativity in the cultural industries. First, there is a prioritization of agency, which does not stand up against the phenomenological argument that we do not own our own practices. Second, creative expression is not necessarily more free, simply alternately structured. As with Judith Butler’s performativity model, contemporary discourses of creativity assume it to have a unique quality by which it eludes determination (relying on tropes of fluidity), whereas it can be countered that it is in spontaneous, intuitive practice that we are at our least agencical. Third, the article argues against the idea that by authorizing journalists (and audiences) to express themselves, creativity is democratizing, since the always-already nature of recognition means that subjects can only voice their position within an established terrain rather than engage active positioning.

Drawing on interviews with war correspondents, editors, political and military personnel, this ar... more Drawing on interviews with war correspondents, editors, political and military personnel, this article investigates the political dimension of the structuration and structuring effects of the reporter’s experience of journalism. Self-reflection and judgements about colleagues confirm that there are dominant norms for interpreting and acting in conflict scenarios which, while contingent upon socio-historical context, are interpreted as natural. But the prevalence of such codes masks the systematically misrecognized symbolic systems of mystification and ambivalence – systems which reproduce hierarchies and gatekeeping structures in the field, but which are either experienced as unremarkable, dismissed with irony and cynicism, or not present to the consciousness of the war correspondent. The article builds on recent theories of journalistic disposition, ideology, discourse and professionalism, and describes the political dimension of journalistic practice perceived in the field as apolitical. It addresses the gendering of war correspondence, the rise of the journalist as moral authority, and questions the extent to which respondent reflections can be defensibly analytically determined.

Published in Celebrity Studies 2(2): 230-2.

Conexión pública: prácticas cívicas y uso de medios en cinco países, 2017

Full details here: https://he.palgrave.com/page/detail/media-and-everyday-life-tim-markham/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137477187

Click through for a more detailed synopsis and cover image.

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019

Hodgson, Guy (ed.) (2017) Conflict, Trauma and the Media: A Collection of Essays. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing., 2017

Books reviewed: Lina Dencik and Oliver Leistert (eds), Critical Perspectives on Social Media and... more Books reviewed:

Gianpietro Mazzoleni (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Political Communication, First Edition. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2014

Media, Culture & Society 36(1): 89-104, 2014

Published in Celebrity Studies 2(2): 230-2.

British journal of sociology, 2008

A national UK survey (N=1017) examined the contribution of media consumption to explaining three ... more A national UK survey (N=1017) examined the contribution of media consumption to explaining three indicators of civic participation – likelihood of voting, interest in politics, and actions taken in response to a public issue of concern to the respondent. Multiple regression analysis was used to test the variance explained by media use variables after first controlling for demographic, social and political predictors of each indicator of participation. Media use significantly added to the explanation of civic participation as follows. In accounting for voting, demographic and political/social factors mattered, but so too did some media habits (listening to the radio and engagement with the news). Interest in politics was accounted for by political/social factors and by media use, especially higher news engagement and lower media trust. However, taking action on an issue of concern was explained only by political/social factors, with the exception that slightly fewer actions were taken by those who watched more television. These findings provided little support for the media malaise thesis, and instead were interpreted as providing qualified support for the cognitive/motivational theory of news as a means of engaging the public.

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2007

Media and cultural research has an important contribution to make to recent debates about decline... more Media and cultural research has an important contribution to make to recent debates about declines in democratic engagement: is for example celebrity culture a route into democratic engagement for those otherwise disengaged? This article contributes to this debate by reviewing qualitative and quantitative findings from a UK project on 'public connection'. Using self-produced diaries (with in-depth multiple interviews) as well as a nationwide survey, the authors argue that while celebrity culture is an important point of social connection sustained by media use, it is not linked in citizens' own accounts to issues of public concern. Survey data suggest that those who particularly follow celebrity culture are the least engaged in politics and least likely to use their social networks to involve themselves in action or discussion about public-type issues. This does not mean 'celebrity culture' is 'bad', but it challenges suggestions of how popular culture might contribute to effective democracy.

Qualitative Inquiry, 2007

The relationship between governments and citizens in many contemporary democracies is haunted by ... more The relationship between governments and citizens in many contemporary democracies is haunted by uncertainty and sociologists face the task of listening effectively to citizens’ own reflections on this uncertain relationship. This article reflects on the qualitative methodology of a recently completed UK project which used a combination of diary and multiple interviews/ focus groups to track over a fieldwork period of up to a year citizens’ reflections on their relationship to a public world and the contribution to this of their media consumption. In particular, the article considers how the project’s multiple methods enabled multiple angles on the inevitable artificiality and performative dimension of the diary process, resulting in rich data on people’s complex reflections on the uncertain position of the contemporary citizen.

Media, Culture & Society, 2008

Interpellation (Butler, 1996) refers to the calling forth or incitement of individuals to enact p... more Interpellation (Butler, 1996) refers to the calling forth or incitement of individuals to enact prescribed performances of selfhood that are judged according to criteria over which that individual has no say. Recently (Van Zoonen, 2013) this perspective has been applied to the colonising logic underpinning consumerism – that while you’re presented with endless choices, you’ve no choice but to present as a consumer. In the age of big data it is argued that the sheer proliferation of coercive subjectivation is democratically damaging insofar as, first, it obviates the possibility of meaningful consent and, second, it comprises so many incited performances as to render the notion of a stable, autonomous self unviable (Gunkel, 2012). But as with demography, categorisation through datafication matters politically because it establishes norms against which you will come to be judged (and judge yourself) in a way that feels increasingly natural (Foucault, 1980). It doesn’t follow that the demographer is interested in controlling you individually. Algorithms too operate at the level of populations, and this means that their relation to political subjectivity cannot be seen as one of simple threat. This paper begins from the proposition that political subjectivity does not consist in the expression of one’s core identity in an established public space, and nor is it clinched in decisive moments like elections or arrests. Instead it consists in discontinuous, inconsistent and ambivalent practices of thinking, talking and acting that for the most part do not look obviously political at all. The upshot is that big data cannot call one forth fully formed and deeply implicated in its reductive logics, and nor does it threaten an otherwise inviolate self. There are specific risks of datafication encroaching on different aspects of our lives, but there’s more to political subjectivation than can be condensed by cultures of datafication.

In recent media and political theory (Fraser & Honneth, 2003; McNay, 2008) the idea of affective ... more In recent media and political theory (Fraser & Honneth, 2003; McNay, 2008) the idea of affective solidarity has been treated as a contradiction in terms. Any relation to the other consisting in sympathy or pity cannot form the basis of full subjective recognition of the other, and in practice is often actively dehumanising. But Chouliaraki (2013) points out that the possibilities of engaging with audiences on an emotional register around issues of distant suffering go back to d’Alembert (see Sennett, 1977) and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment (1759), chiming with Boltanski’s (1999) acerbic observation that to drily recount the observable facts of a massacre is itself a perversity. As with Charles Taylor (1992), the key is to harness emotion in order to create a space in which remote observers can imagine their way in to the lived experience of suffering and injustice.

And yet with all of these interventions there remains the notion that solidarity is contingent upon a rupture of habitual being-in-the-world, a breaking through of the fog of daily life that produces a revelatory consciousness of the subjectivity of the other. In journalistic contexts this leads to practices that aim at intensive or extensive encounters with the other that transcend the affective livedness of everyday routines. Against this conventional wisdom, this paper argues that solidarity with distant others is not clinched in spite of the merely felt experience of the other in everyday life – an experience characterised by distraction, ambivalence and unreflexive sentimentality – but instead is predicated precisely on that mere feltness. Interviews with heavy media-use journalists and campaigners in Egypt and Lebanon are used to posit that it is the discontinuous and dispersed nature of multiple media immersion that affords the kinds of affective experience – busyness, pleasure, resistance and above all ambivalence – around which the kind of subjective recognition theorised by de Beauvoir (1948) and Levinas (1961) can crystallise. And, finally, it is possible that if this is true for professionals and committed activists, it might also hold for audiences and publics more broadly.

Against the grain of recent theoretical interventions (e.g. Sassen, 2011) that describe a topolog... more Against the grain of recent theoretical interventions (e.g. Sassen, 2011) that describe a topology of ‘protest spaces’ and designate the practices emerging out of them as inherently contentious or agonistic, this paper argues that the key ingredient in understanding how contentiousness congeals in multiply-mediated contexts is time. Specifically, this means the extent to which any material or communicative space is able to sustain cultures of contentious practices amid the routines and rhythms of everyday life. The point then is not defining a kind of ideal political space – one which is the inverse of a Habermassian public sphere in that it engenders critical moments of contentiousness that rupture the fabric of political orthodoxy – but rather to conceive of contentiousness as something experienced in discrete and usually non-transcendent encounters that at first glance look anything but heroic. The paper draws on fieldwork conducted with media activists in Lebanon that investigates the phenomenological experience of their work, documenting practices recognisably from the iconography of protest as well as the more mundane aspects of their lives – everything from transport, technological infrastructure and workplace cultures to all of the affective work that goes into sustaining social relations. Drawing on de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), the paper argues that viewed at the level of quotidian experience most contentious actors fail to be contentious most of the time. However, those routine failures do not undermine resistance or solidarity but precisely enable them. It is by rethinking spaces of contentiousness not as self-contained and temporally continuous but disintegrative and discontinuous that we come to understand that political transformativity is not hindered by the messy affective distractions associated with the social experience of mediated and physical spaces alike, but is predicated upon them.

This paper draws on the findings of the Media Consumption and the Future of Public Connection res... more This paper draws on the findings of the Media Consumption and the Future of Public Connection research project (Couldry et al., 2007) to sound a cautionary note about the instrumental use of celebrity advocacy to (re)engage audiences in public life. It begins by setting out quantitative data (Couldry & Markham, 2008) which suggests that those most interested in celebrity, while also paying attention to the main stories of the day, are also least likely to participate in any form of politics. However, this does not rule out the possibility of forging a link between celebrity and public engagement, raising questions about what would potentially sustain such an articulation. This directs us to a phenomenological understanding of how media and politics are lived at the level of the everyday, and the qualitative dimension of the project’s analysis highlighted two themes. The first is that the usefulness of celebrity culture for those interested in it is precisely that it can be worn lightly. Such individuals are certainly capable of discussing moral issues, but celebrity serves the specific purpose of being, in Scannell’s words, ‘just talkable about’. The second is that several respondents expressed resentment at being ‘forced’ to think about particular celebrities, or to think about them in certain ways. To be sure, these ‘ways’ usually had little in common with the likely goals of a celebrity advocate (for instance, their conduct in private), but there was a clear sense of resistance to directed thinking. The paper ends by contextualising these findings within the theoretical framework of the politics of recognition, arguing that strategies aiming at reconnection or rearticulation of celebrity culture subjects in a specifically political direction instead tend to merely reveal extant, durable depoliticisation – and, more broadly, that media can do little to engage those who are already turned away.

In The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Pierre Bourdieu (1991) attempts to account for the... more In The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Pierre Bourdieu (1991) attempts to account for the philosopher's career in terms of field strategies. Bourdieu's intention is not to reduce Heidegger's work to an algorithmic inevitability -its particular form could not have been predicted just by looking at the state of the philosophical field when he emerged -but he does argue that when you look back on Heidegger's oeuvre it does make sense purely in terms of historical context and more generally how individuals and institutions vie for prestige, status and power. Bourdieu observes that on entering the profession, young philosophers will seek to overturn a few sacred cows -this is central to the idea of cultural consecration, meaning that the way we compete against each other is not simply about seizing someone else's cultural capital, but appropriating and changing what is recognised as valuable and authoritative. In Heidegger's case what was overthrown was the Kantian understanding of ontology, Bourdieu's point being that if you look a little more deeply you'll see that what in fact transpired with the rise of Heideggerian phenomenology was a conservative revolution, with many of the principal tenets of neo-Kantianism remaining firmly in place. Now that's quite enough about Heidegger. But what I find useful about this example is what it

This paper begins with the assertion that creativity in journalism has moved from being a matter ... more This paper begins with the assertion that creativity in journalism has moved from being a matter of guile and ingenuity to being about expressiveness, and that this reflects a broader cultural shift from professional expertise to the authenticity of personal expression as dominant modes of valorization. It then seeks to unpack the political normative baggage that underpins the case for creativity in the cultural industries. First, there is a prioritization of agency, which does not stand up against the phenomenological argument that we do not own our own practices. Second, creative expression is not necessarily more free, simply alternately structured. As with Judith Butler's performativity model, creativity is assumed to have a unique quality by which it eludes determination (relying on tropes of fluidity), whereas it can be countered that it is in spontaneous, intuitive practice that we are at our least agencical. Third, the paper argues against the idea that by authorizing journalists (and audiences) to express themselves, creativity is democratizing: the always-already nature of recognition means that subjects can only voice their position rather than engage active positioning. The paper also incorporates an analysis of institutionalized creativity, looking at how the Guardian has sought to encourage spontaneity and synergy through the design and layout of its work spaces.

This paper draws on a discourse analysis of interviews with British and American war reporters an... more This paper draws on a discourse analysis of interviews with British and American war reporters and others with a stake in the field of war reporting, conceived in the Bourdieusian sense, in order to ask how this journalistic genre has been affected by recent changes in military media management strategies and developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs). It takes a political phenomenological perspective, focussing on the collective factors which structure an individual's conscious experience of professional cultural production, and the relations of power in which this is situated. This approach re-interprets themes such as professional identity, news values and journalistic ethics as cultures of practice. Such practices are properly characterized as strategic -not in the sense that they are cynically deployed by war reporters for personal gain, but because their normalization as part of the taken-for-granted world of the journalist is located within a broader symbolic economy through which different groups of actors vie for authority and status. Previous work by the author identified two such cultures of practice, one concerning the esotericization of what constitutes high quality war reporting, and the other concerning a reporter's self-positioning in relation to the journalistic object (and to peers) through invocations of ambivalence towards power and risk. These underpin a collectively recognized form of authority in the field which is highly individualized, irreverent towards power and guileful. However, fields are not static, and this paper investigates whether the world that war reporters inhabit is being transformed by three factors: the increasing prevalence of pooling and embedding, the increasing availability of portable communications to journalists and soldiers alike, and the rise of citizen journalism.

writes of war correspondents 'scowling at their notebooks', and this is not meant as caricature b... more writes of war correspondents 'scowling at their notebooks', and this is not meant as caricature but the corporeal expression of an epistemological orientation to the world in which facts have to be wrestled into submission. This paper takes a phenomenological approach to ask whether there is a distinct orientation of citizen journalism and blogging, exploring the corporeal, temporal and spatial aspects of non-professional practices of media production. That production devices are worn by the body rather than the body being physically addressed to immovable pieces of equipment might be experienced as liberating, but this fluidity may also be connected to the increasing casualisation and precarity of media work. Likewise, the embedding and intertwining of media production and consumption in everyday life may provide the basis for more, not less, pervasive embodiment of anticipatory structures through routinisation. Hunching over a laptop suggests an epistemology in which facts and opinions are urgent and potentially subversive, though it is also tied to the romanticised individualism with which citizen journalism in particular is associated. Practices of media production are not destructured but restructured by new technologies: there is no tweeting from nowhere, nor is a 'third place' such as a local café unsituated. The paper ends by arguing against the myth of the citizen journalist as urban warrior, and suggests that attention should instead be focussed on the domestic, commercial and suburban contexts which structure and are structured by practices of citizen journalism and blogging.

This paper begins by setting out the limits of two recently dominant models for making sense of n... more This paper begins by setting out the limits of two recently dominant models for making sense of new global practices of media production: information democratisation, and Foucauldian approaches in which emergent cultures of practice are cast as regulatory regimes. It argues that the idea of mediated citizenship need to be rethought, both because of an apparent radical dissensus about the orientation of public connection, and because the normative pathologization of disconnection is not supported by the empirical evidence. The move away from institutional production is not inherently democratic but instead a shift from one misrecognised symbolic economy of authority to another, and this is best understood phenomenologically. New cultures of practice should be interpreted in corporeal, spatial and temporal terms, taking into account increasing interweaving of production and consumption, and the (functional) myths of the decentring, suburbanisation and domesticisation of journalism. Applying political phenomenology to economies of collective and amateur media production demonstrates the stubborn durability of the individual in the lifeworld of user-generated content. Against recent thinking about wikis and citizen journalism, we are directed instead back to the political determinants of individuation -in particular the overdetermined, restrictive conditions of possibility of signification and subjectification -in new media production.

Drawing on interviews with war correspondents, editors, political and military personnel, this pa... more Drawing on interviews with war correspondents, editors, political and military personnel, this paper investigates the possibility that the way journalists reflect on their everyday practice, as well as the perceived natural status of journalistic ethics, obscures other symbolic economies. Self-reflection and judgements about colleagues confirm that there are dominant norms for interpreting and acting in conflict scenarios which, while contingent upon sociohistorical context, are interpreted as common sense. But the prevalence of such codes masks the systematically misrecognised symbolic systems of mystification and disinterest -systems which reproduce hierarchies and gatekeeping structures in the field, but which are either dismissed with irony and cynicism, or not present to the consciousness of the war correspondent. The paper builds on recent theories of journalistic disposition, ideology, discourse and professionalism. It addresses the gendering of war correspondence, the rise of the journalist as moral authority, and questions the extent to which interviewee reflections should be analytically (over)determined. It ends with a deontological defence of journalistic ethics against their political construction as purely and nonconsciously strategic.

This conference seeks to bring together an interdisciplinary range of phenomenological perspectiv... more This conference seeks to bring together an interdisciplinary range of phenomenological perspectives on media, technology and communication. Beyond merely describing the experience of media in everyday life, it asks what constitutes the conditions of that experience, whether in material, political, social or technological form. Papers will be drawn from from disciplines ranging from media history and archaeology to philosophy, cultural geography, political theory, audience studies, software studies and digital aesthetics.

Held to mark the launch of The Politics of War Reporting: Authority, Authenticity and Morality (M... more Held to mark the launch of The Politics of War Reporting: Authority, Authenticity and Morality (Manchester University Press), this inter-disciplinary symposium, chaired by Dr Scott Rodgers (Birkbeck), featured contributions from Prof Stuart Allan (Bournemouth), Prof Diana Coole (Birkbeck) and Prof Phil Hammond (London South Bank).