Media (Anthropology)

Social media platforms have quickly transformed communication, relationships, identities, education and power relations. These platforms have also become a popular topic for discussion and research, yet most claims made about social media are very general. This course takes an anthropological approach to social media in order to speak about the ways social media use is embedded in and reflective of specific cultural contexts. The course concentrates on content of social media rather than platforms, and also explores social media as a research method for understanding how people's lives converge in both online and offline spaces. We will consider the incredible variation in social media that emerges on different continents, among people of different class and religious backgrounds, for people with different gender and sexual identities, and among people who are differently embedded in global systems. Course Objectives Students will be able to: 1. explain key terms that are central to an anthropological understanding of social media 2. relate social media to topics of cultural and social diversity 3. relate issues in the study of social media with power relations, ideology, and social institutions 4. think comparatively in terms of both universals of social media as well as local inflections 5. apply anthropological methods to their own project 6. apply key themes, theories, and approaches of anthropology to their own analysis

Turkey has witnessed a proliferation of Islamic television channels since the liberalization of broadcasting in the 1990s. The programming of these TV channels was initially distinctly theological in character, with shows focusing on the doctrinal, scriptural, and ritualistic aspects of Islam. More recently, however, they have started producing family-friendly entertainment programs as well as shows aimed at “strengthening the family.” Islamic broadcasters intend their family-focused programming as civil initiatives against what they see as the increasing corrosion of the “moral fabric of the family” and devaluation of “family values” in contemporary Turkish society. In these TV shows, audiences are provided with guidance and techniques that would help them cultivate ethical dispositions, knowledge, and skills so that they could assume autonomy and responsibility for administering their families more effectively. Islamic broadcasters explicitly identify their role as assisting the state in  fighting social problems through their programming. Moreover, the discourses and sensibilities promoted on television articulate with the biopolitical concerns of the nation-state and the emerging rationalities of governance. While Islamic television professionals’ self-ascribed mission to “strengthen the family” emerges from a religiously inspired moral imperative to provide service, it simultaneously indicates their internalization of neoliberal rationalities of governance that promote the responsibilization of non-governmental actors for providing social services as well as that of individuals for supporting and caring for their family members. [Keywords: Islam, television, media, family, family values, secularism, neoliberalism, Turkey]

You can download the paper at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/670934

During the onslaught of the Islamic caliphate on Kobanî, Syria, media outlets across the globe broadcast pictures of brave and often unveiled Kurdish women fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a quintessentially male force of destruction. The images of women fighting Islamist male aggressors aroused outrage, admiration, and pity among observers. But had all Kurdish fighters been male or had women fought for ISIS, viewers might have reacted differently. To examine some of the most widely disseminated gendered pictures and videos of the Syrian uprising in the media, this article draws on Mohja Kahf’s three categories, which typify how Muslim women, Arab women, or both are perceived by the Anglophone reading and viewing public: the first is victims; the second, escapees; and the third, pawns of patriarchy and male power. While this typology helps in examining gendered images of the Syrian uprising, it also obscures the socioeconomic realities on the ground.

Indigenous futures are not only vital for Aboriginal people; they also provide valuable insight into global challenges. Building on Indigenous futurisms scholarship on Native science-fiction films, I engage recent Indigenous Australian video projects that draw more subtly on futures to illustrate how and why they articulate generative hope in the postapocalyptic present.

This collection of essays engages the ways in which anthropological understandings of Indigenous media can be expanded and reimagined through a focus on futurity. Throughout, the contributors pose two distinct yet interconnected questions: What does the future of Indigenous media hold? And, how is the future itself being increasingly asserted through Indigenous media production? In a sense, then, the collection serves as both retrospective and opening. We reflect on the history of Indigenous media scholarship in tracing the trajectory of emerging forms and content, while also considering how the future is mobilized as a means for establishing temporal sovereignty in relation to anachronistic pasts. In doing so, we aim to provoke new questions about the histories, politics, and futures of Indigenous self-representation.

Download a free pdf at the link above

Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in the city of Alto Hospicio in northern Chile, this book describes how the residents use social media, and the consequences of this use in their daily lives. Nell Haynes argues that social media is a place where Alto Hospicio’s residents – or Hospiceños – express their feelings of marginalisation that result from living in city far from the national capital, and with a notoriously low quality of life compared to other urban areas in Chile.

In actively distancing themselves from residents in cities such as Santiago, Hospiceños identify as marginalised citizens, and express a new kind of social norm. Yet Haynes finds that by contrasting their own lived experiences with those of people in metropolitan areas, Hospiceños are strengthening their own sense of community and the sense of normativity that shapes their daily lives. This exciting conclusion is illustrated by the range of social media posts about personal relationships, politics and national citizenship, particularly on Facebook.

This conversation considers some of the disciplinary divides and anxieties surrounding contemporary research on media and mobility through a discussion of linkages between these two research fields and the role of non-media centric focuses on media across the disciplines. The conversation was sparked by the three-day workshop, Anthropologies of Media and Mobility: Theorizing Movement and Circulations across Entangled Fields, held in September, 2017 at The University of Cologne.1 One of the coconvenors Roger Norum sat down with a trio of leading scholars working on media and mobility, Heather Horst, David Morley, and Noel B. Salazar. They address a number of critical topics such as the nature of binary and category disruption, contextually dependent forms of media, the value of collaborative scholarship, the roles of methodologies in academic practice and the critical role played by early-career researchers in pushing various boundaries across our fields.