Routledge Citizen Media and Practice: Currents, Connections, Challenges (Critical Perspectives on Citizen Media)

This groundbreaking collection advances understanding of the concept of media practices by critically interrogating its relevance for the study of citizen and activist media. Media as practice has emerged as a powerful approach to understanding the media’s significance in contemporary society. Bringing together contributions from leading scholars in sociology, media and communication, social movement and critical data studies, this book stimulates dialogue across previously separate traditions of research on citizen and activist media practices and stakes out future directions for research in this burgeoning interdisciplinary field. Framed by a foreword by Nick Couldry and a substantial introductory chapter by the editors, contributions to the volume trace the roots and appropriations of the concept of media practice in Latin American communication theory; reflect on the relationship between activist agency and technological affordances; explore the relevance of the media practice approach for the study of media activism, including activism that takes media as its central object of struggle; and demonstrate the significance of the media practice approach for understanding processes of mediatization and datafication. Offering both a comprehensive introduction to scholarship on citizen media and practice and a cutting-edge exploration of a novel theoretical framework, the book is ideal for students and experienced scholars alike. Review "Thinking about and exploring media practices entail the recognition that we need another kind of gaze, other points of view, other places from which to make sense of culture and the media. Citizen Media and Practice provides a renewed understanding of media practices in connection to the people and the territories they inhabit. The book explores the ambiguities of media practices and charts the possibilities they open up to imagine another kind of world and connect to other ways of thinking about culture." Jesús Martín-Barbero, author of Communication, culture and hegemony: From the media to mediations (Sage, 1993) (Orig. edition: De los Medios a las Mediaciones. Comunicación, cultura y hegemonía, Gustavo Gilli, 1987) "Citizen Media and Practice is an outstanding contribution to practice-oriented research on citizen and activist media today. Its contributions are delicately balanced for stimulating interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation based on empirical research into a great diversity of topics related to media activism and social movements in Europe and Latin America. The book offers an up-to-date, cutting-edge overview of how practice approaches are useful for grasping contemporary activism and media processes, and how materialities, digitalities, discourses, bodies, affects and emotions are embedded into political actions that aim to change the world we live in, through our makings and aspirations, doings and sayings. This book demonstrates that practice theories are alive and kicking because they are powerful tools to understand ourselves as citizens; active agents of the world we inhabit". Elisenda Ardèvol, Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology at UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya), Barcelona. Director of the Mediaccions Research Group in Culture and Digital Communication. "Stephansen and Treré have brought together a very competent and interdisciplinary collective of researchers that together have delivered an inspiring book! It builds necessary bridges between Anglo-Saxon and Latin American scholarship; it retrieves relevant and almost forgotten past research, letting it inform contemporary scholarship: and it establishes connections between research into citizen media practice with relevant and emerging fields of inquiry in the social sciences. The result is a very commendable book that challenges and pushes the boundaries of not only media scholarship but of social science more broadly." Thomas Tufte, Professor at and Directo