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Bart Cammaerts
Title of the presentation:
Mediation and Resistance: an overview
Short abstract of the presentation:
This lecture will first and foremost address theoreticallythe various kinds of relationships between media, communication and resistance. By drawing on social movement literature, political philosophy, political theory as well as media and communication studies, the various ways that media and communication are relevant for the organization of, the mobilization for, the (self-)representation of, the decoding of resistance but also the imagination of what is possible as tactics and strategies of resistance, will be addressed. In this lecture a possible way in which to bridge political science and media and communication studies will be presented. It will be argued that the double articulation of the concept of mediation, as put forward by Silverstone, is highly useful for this as it is dialectical, accounting for both structure and agency, approaches the media not as a singular hegemonic actor, accounts for various forms of power, addresses the audience/the user and the decoding/adaptation process and last but not least also relates to technology and to communication, especially the latter being often absent from traditional media studies. Each of these characteristics are in themselves relevant to current tactics and strategies of resistance as deployed by activists. In conjunction with each other it could be argued that activists todayare increasingly empowered but at the same time also constrained by a mediation opportunity structure, which is semi-independent from the political opportunity structure. Short empirical cases will include: transnational advocacy networks, transnational anti-capitalist protest movements, the most recent UK student protest movement, political jamming and cyber-activism, information activism and passive, egoistic and/or ‘lazy’ forms of mediated resistance.
Short biography:
Bart Cammaerts is lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research interests include multi-stakeholder policy processes; media strategies of activists; alternative/community media and the emergence of new tools such as blogs. His most recent and forthcoming books include; Internet-Mediated Participation beyond the Nation State (Manchester University Press, in press), Understanding Alternative Media (with Olga Bailey and Nico Carpentier, Open University Press, 2008), and Reclaiming the Media: communication rights and democratic media roles (Edited with Nico Carpentier, Intellect, 2007). He chairs the Communication and Democracy section of ECREA and he is deputy-chair of the Communication Technology Policy section of IAMCR.
ssc6/Cammaerts.pdf (2,975.15kb; Uploaded 2011-09-08)