Víctor del Arco

This article examines media consumption in highly diverse districts in Spain as representative of recent changes in this field due to new immigration to countries in Southern Europe in times of crisis. Drawing on findings from two surveys, we observed a decrease in access to media specifically aimed at audiences of minority cultures between 2010 and 2012. It is suggested that this decline is not due to a modification in media consumption habits by minority groups, but rather the economic crisis of 2008. Furthermore, we study the consumption of minority media by natives: we observe that youth and more educated individuals consume other cultures’ minority media to a greater extent, particularly the press, radio, and Internet news sources. We suggest that elements are present that public administrations could utilize to further develop a multi-ethnic public sphere. Finally, we explore the emergence of a new transnational dimension to the multi-ethnic public sphere.

This publication is prior to the conference/workshop FAQs About Open Access – The Political Economy of Publishing in Anthropology and Beyond, held at Medialab-Prado (Madrid) on the 16th and 17th of October 2014. We, as conference conveners and members of the Research Group on Anthropology with a Public Orientation (GIAOP), are interested in the current debates about open access and it is out of that shared interest that this conference emerges. It has been more than a decade since the first declarations for open and free access to publicly-funded scientific knowledge were issued (the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002 and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access one year after). Even though the debate has proliferated with strength in the Anglo-American academia in the last few years, we think that the way in which it has done so is extremely narrow, limited to putting forth proposals for how to make academic publications available online —and generally not questioning the busines...