Understanding citizen media as practice: agents, processes, publics (original) (raw)
Related papers
Citizen Media and Public Space: Diverse Expressions of Citizenship and Dissent, 2016
Much recent commentary on citizen media has focused on online platforms as means through which citizens may disseminate self-produced media content that challenges dominant discourses or makes visible hidden realities. This chapter goes beyond a concern with media content to explore the much broader range of socially situated practices that develop around citizen media. Drawing on Couldry’s proposal for a practice paradigm in media research, it suggests shifting the focus from ‘citizen media’ to ‘citizen media practices’ and demonstrates, through a case study of communication activism in the World Social Forum, how this framework can bring into view a broad range of citizen media practices (beyond those directly concerned with the production and circulation of media content), the different forms of agency that such practices make possible, and the social fabric they can help generate. I conclude by arguing that a practice framework necessitates a rethink of the way that the concept of (counter-) publics is used in the context of citizen media. Citizen media practices of the kind described here can be understood not only as practices of ‘making public’ previously unreported issues and perspectives, but as practices of public-making: practices that support the formation of publics.
Book Review: Citizen Media and Practice: Currents, Connections, Challenges
JOMEC Journal, 2021
In Citizen Media and Practice: Currents, Connections, Challenges, editors Hilde C. Stephansen and Emiliano Treré (2020) bring together contributors to explore ways to further our thinking about media practices with a specific focus on citizen and activist media. The book is intended to stimulate dialogue among scholars in different fields and promote discussion and debate over media practice approaches between Anglophone and Latin American scholars. In his foreword, media scholar Nick Couldry (2020) welcomes this exciting collection for reconnecting recent research on media practice approaches in North America and Europe with its Latin American roots, while focusing on citizen media and developing a wide range of implications of the 'media as practice' paradigm. The 'practice' turn (Couldry 2004, 2012) in media studies has inspired social movements and media scholars to develop more research on citizen and activist media in recent years. Stephansen and Treré (2020) open this collection by introducing 'media practice'
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media
(co-edited with Mona Baker, Bolette Blaagaard and Henry Jones) London & New York: Routledge., 2021
This is the fi rst authoritative reference work to map the multifaceted and vibrant site of citizen media research and practice, incorporating insights from across a wide range of scholarly areas. Citizen media is a fast-evolving terrain that cuts across a variety of disciplines. It explores the physical artefacts, digital content, performative interventions, practices and discursive expressions of aff ective sociality that ordinary citizens produce as they participate in public life to eff ect aesthetic or socio-political change. The seventy-seven entries featured in this pioneering resource provide a rigorous overview of extant scholarship, deliver a robust critique of key research themes and anticipate new directions for research on a variety of topics. Cross-references and recommended reading suggestions are included at the end of each entry to allow scholars from diff erent disciplinary backgrounds to identify relevant connections across diverse areas of citizen media scholarship and explore further avenues of research. Featuring contributions by leading scholars and supported by an international panel of consultant editors, the Encyclopedia is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers in media studies, social movement studies, performance studies, political science and a variety of other disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. It will also be of interest to non-academics involved in activist movements and those working to eff ect change in various areas of social life.
Stephansen, H.C. and Treré, E. (2019) ‘Practice what you preach? Currents, connections, and challenges in theorizing citizen media and practice’. In: Stephansen, H. C. and Treré, E. (eds) Citizen media and practice: currents, connections, challenges. London: Routledge, pp. 1-34., 2019
This chapter explores the past, assesses the present and delineates the future of a media practice approach to citizen media. The first section provides an extensive overview of the different currents in research on media practices, identifying the antecedents of the media practice approach in several theoretical traditions and highlighting possible points of convergence between them. Hence, we ground the roots of the practice approach in Latin American communication and media studies, we scrutinize Couldry's conceptualization in connection to theories of practices within the social sciences, and we examine audience research, media anthropology, social movement studies, citizen and alternative media, and Communication for Development and Social Change. The second section takes stock of the current 'state of the art' of practice-focused research on citizen and activist media and develops a critical assessment of how the concept of media practices has been used in recent literature, identifying key strengths and shortcomings. In this section, we also discuss the integration of media practices with other concepts, such as mediation, mediatization, media ecologies, media archeology, media imaginaries, and the public sphere. The third section delineates future directions for research on citizen media and practice, reflecting on some of the challenges facing this growing interdisciplinary field. Here, we illustrate how the media practice approach provides a powerful framework for researching the pressing challenges posed by mediatization and datafication. Further, we highlight the need for deeper theoretical engagement, underline the necessity of dialogue between different traditions, and point out some unresolved issues and limitations. The chapter concludes with an outline of the contributions to this edited collection.
2017
The article tackles two main aspects related to the interaction between social movements and digital technologies. First, it reflects on the need to include and combine different theoretical approaches in social movement studies so as to construct more meaningful understanding of how social movement actors deals with digital technologies and with what outcomes in societies. In particular, the article argues that media ecology and media practice approaches serve well to reach this objective as: they recognize the complex multi-faceted array of media technologies, professions and contents with which social movement actors interact; they historicize the use of media technologies in social movements; and they highlight the agency of social movement actors in relation to media technologies while avoiding a media-centric approach to the subject matter. Second, this article employs a media practice perspective to explore two interrelated trends in contemporary societies that the articles in this special issue deal with: the personalization and individualization of politics, and the role of the grassroots in political mobilizations.
Kidd Intro to Video Activism Citizen Media & Practice
Introduction to Practice Approaches to Video Activism , 2018
Pre-publication version. (2018) Introduction to Part III: Practice Approaches to Video Activism. In Hilde Stephansen and Emiliano Trere (eds). Citizen Media and Practice: Currents, Connections, Challenges. London & New York: Routledge.
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.
Studying media practices in social movements
ccnr.infotech.monash.edu
Even if the dimension of communication is central to collective action, standard approaches to communication from social movement theories have adopted a rather instrumental view of the media. Moreover, studies on social movements and ICTs have usually focused on "particular" portions of the Internet, such as websites, mailing lists, online groups, blogs and, more recently, social networking sites. There is a tendency in this scholarship to replicate the same 'bias' that some authors have ascribed to the general literature that have investigated the dynamics between social movements and the media: the focus on only one medium at a time. Based on Nardi and O"Day"s (2000) conceptual framework, drawing on a qualitative research which explored the media practices of a student collective from the University of Bologna, part of the Italian 'Anomalous Wave' movement, it will be shown that activists interact with a complex information ecology. This information ecology is a complex system where different technologies coexist and coevolve and where keystone species such as tech-savvy activists play a fundamental role. The exploration of this ecology allows us to highlight the complex interrelations, negotiations and conflicts among old and new technologies for activism and permits us to go beyond the "one-medium bias" that characterize most of the social movement literature.