Community and Activist Media

While much literature on place-making focuses on ways in which a media presence or ‘visibility’ of place can facilitate place-based activism, political power, and socio-economic benefits, this chapter positions media invisibility of place as a form of communicative praxis. It employs Hjarvard, Mortensen, and Eskjær’s (2015) typology of three dynamics of mediatized conflicts—amplification, framing/performative agency, and co-structuring—to argue that, in the aftermath of the highly mediatized 2006 Israeli-Hizballah summer conflict, a group of villagers in southern Lebanon sought communication power by positioning their village ‘outside’ of media frames, severed from mediated continuum(s) of events. The chapter contextualizes this praxis of media invisibility as a response to mediatized conflict, including Lebanon’s transnational, sectarianized news media, and ongoing militarization of Lebanese communication structures. Embedded within the chapter is a discussion of how these research findings related to invisibility were facilitated by a reflexive research approach.

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'

This chapter responds to these calls by aiming to further develop the concept of the tem- porary or pop-up news ecology, a term that seeks to take into account the rapid changes and liquidity in journalism . . . as well as the move to rethink the ways research has tended to limit itself to examining news within individual organizational structures.

This book explores the complex, dynamic, and contested webs of relationships in which three different groups of video makers found themselves when distributing their work on the Internet. It draws upon both the Deleuzian notion of "assemblage" and Actor-Network Theory, which together provide a rich conceptual framework for characterizing and analysing these webs. The groups examined are a UK video activist project, a community of film and television fans originating in the US, and an association of US community television producers.

Rather than taking YouTube as its point of departure, this book centres on the groups themselves, contextualizing their contemporary distribution practices within their pre-Internet histories. It then follows the groups as they drew upon various Internet technologies beyond YouTube to create their often-complex video distribution assemblages, a process that entangled them in these webs of relationships.

Through the analysis of detailed ethnographic fieldwork conducted across a period of several years, this book demonstrates that while the groups found some success in achieving their various goals as video makers, their situations were often problematic and their agency limited, with their practices contested by both human and technological actors within their distribution assemblages.

... Atton, Ed Baxter, Bliz, Daniel Clark, Michael Dean, Steve Dunifer, Friba, Martin James, Michael Lahey, Lynne Lowe, Justin Marler, Nic Millington, Paul O'Connor, Barbara O'Leary, Jerod Poore, Jim Redden, Marleen Stikker, Rena Tangens, Laura Tisoncik, Vicki Travis, V. Vale ...

From the introduction to the book edited by Kevin Howley:

A popular response to the narrow range of voices and perspectives available in an increasingly commercialized communicative space, citizen journalism ini- tiatives have grown exponentially across the globe. In Chapter 9, Kristin Skare Orgeret analyzes one such initiative in post-apartheid South Africa. Specifically, Orgeret examines a Cape Town-based project called “16 Days of Activism”—the brainchild of social worker and hip-hop activist Ryan “Brown” Dalton. Throughout, Orgeret highlights the social, economic, and ideological factors that enable and constrain activist journalism, as well as the discursive practices associated with such projects. Orgeret’s richly described case study makes a timely and relevant contribution to ongoing debates over the democratic potential of alternative and activist media.