Media Ethnography

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/EFZFVsu7scdxzYK7i9Qm/full

Singapore is often represented as an example of a successful “postcolonial” society that transitioned into a developed nation and economy. The government articulates its reliance on enlightenment ideals such as reason and meritocracy, separation of church and state, and equality; but at the same time draws its legitimacy from articulations of “tradition” based on “ethnicity” and “culture.” These contradictions extend to censorship, particularly since the state actively censors the media when it comes to issues of race and religion whenever they threaten to disrupt the appearance of equality, while selectively using repackaged “Asian values” to justify their interventions. To convolute matters further, critics and academics often employ quasi-Western concepts of “freedom of expression” to critique state censorship. So, what underlying assumptions do these various representations articulate? And how do these rival articulations relate to the ways censorship work in practice? Drawing on ethnographic materials obtained during an intensive 15-month fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2013, this article aims to complicate dominant conceptualisations of censorship by shifting its focus onto situated practices.

The past five years have seen a global flourishing of political initiatives in which tech-minded actors of different kinds (geeks, hackers, bloggers, online journalists, citizen politicians, etc.) have played prominent roles. From whistleblowing to online protests, from occupied squares to anti-establishment parties, these ‘freedom technologists’ can no longer be dismissed, particularly after Edward Snowden’s revelations about the surveillance abuses of America’s NSA and allied agencies. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork, Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, is a riveting account of one these new collective actors: Anonymous.

Ethnography online  as an ethnographic division is often critically treated because it allows researchers to investigate a culture without having face to face contact (Hine 2008:259). It is moreover sometimes seen as inferior to traditional ethnography because much of the data collection occurs passively. But even though some researchers argue that online and offline world should be regarded as separated, ethnography online is not condemned to be conducted totally on the Internet, but rather almost naturally expands to related offline contexts. Accordingly, it offers many possibilities to understand a culture’s beliefs, values, norms, social practices, and behavior in online and offline correlations. There are “complex connections between online and offline social spaces [and a] key challenge for the future is to develop forms of ethnography that take seriously the social reality of online settings, whilst also exploring their embedding within everyday life” (Hine 2008: 258). In this respect, in the following, I will discuss why ethnography in and on online environments is a meaningful approach. I want to critically reflect on advantages and disadvantages of ethnography online and in particular consider how useful and appropriate a pure online observation is, compared to other ethnographic methods which might also be extended to the offline world. For this discussion I will take the example of my brief study of two female German YouTubers who are publishing videos concerning their everyday activities about beauty, fashion and ‘do it yourself’ on the online video community YouTube. One of the women I merely observed online via watching her videos, the other one agreed to additionally answer some questions in a personal interview via video call. Because consequently, I obtained information from both informants via different research methods, I want to critically discuss whether my research findings are anyway comparable. For reasons of simplification and for the flow of reading, I will use the male form of a word when actually gendering would be necessary.

... the editorial team at the Oakland Tribune, Janine Warner at The Miami Herald/El Nuevo Herald, Éamonn Ó Dónaill and Fionnuala MacAodha at ... I am extremely grateful to those who read later-stage versions of chapters: John Damaso, John Diaz, Ann Joski, and Phil Murray. ...

Co-authored with Lars Müller, also at the Georg Eckert Institute. Our focus is on the ways in which the production practices at educational publishers indicate some quite dramatic shifts in conceptions of "colonialism" and "Africa". But we also explore the tension which apprears when authors actively aim to change representations but remain within - and thus reconstute - an overarching discourse of western modernisation.

The dissertation’s aim is to explore the everyday relevance media artifacts have for young children. It discusses and further develops analytical concepts that are committed to taking the children’s perspectives on possibilities and limitations of such artifacts seriously. These conceptual developments are rooted in the author’s participation in a daycare practice in Berlin, Germany. The daycare’s situational approach precisely attempted to draw on the children’s everyday life experiences so as to engage in problem-oriented learning projects, on media artifacts and beyond.

When analyzing the situated problems the children experienced in relation to both the pedagogical-educational arrangement of the daycare as well as subjectively relevant media artifacts, it emerges that their personal struggles are connected to broader societal contradictions. For instance, their problems with specific artifact-arrangements are interrelated with the staff’s, the parents’, and the researcher’s struggles. Children’s struggles with media artifacts are therefore not analyzed in isolation, but as part of the daycare’s sociomaterial interplay.

The dissertation explores and analyzes this interplay, so as to conclude that sociomaterial arrangements must be understood as inextricably intertwined with the process of conducting everyday life. Sociomaterial arrangements such as media artifacts are maintained and transformed by all practice participants. They all contribute in unique ways to upholding and changing jointly shared arrangements through conflictual collaboration, irrespective of their age. Daycare and other learning institutions should therefore systematically promote collaborative explorations of media-related struggles across age thresholds.

"An examination of the role of telenovelas - a Latin American sister to the Western soap opera - this book looks at their impact on the everyday lives of Latin American audiences. It seeks to explain telenovelas’ cultural and commercial success; the meanings, identities, and social actions articulated through watching telenovelas; and how audiences - often first- or second-generation migrants in the huge cities of Latin America - use telenovelas in coping with urban life and modernity.

This case study includes a range of 'telenovela interviews' with low-income urban women. Tufte situates this study within the theoretical framework of media ethnography and in doing so, draws heavily on Latin American cultural theory."

How is intimacy, proximity, and adjacency (Nähe in German) generated through using communication media in everyday interactions? What infrastructures are provided by media that afford "technogenic proximity / intimacy"? The contributions of this volume are based on ethnographic research (1999-2000) in Berlin.

Discussions of mainstream Hindi cinema as a form of public address have largely ignored how political content may be incorporated into the popular idiom behind and before the film text. The primary objective of screenwriting studies has been to isolate the writing process of a film as a significant media practice, which accommodates rich ethnographic perspectives on script development across film industries. Using my interviews with two prominent Bollywood creators, Prakash Jha and Anjum Rajabali, this chapter aims to initiate a discussion on the political economy of scripting mainstream cinema. A close study of their collaborative script development work will provide rich insights into a wide range of creative, cultural and industrial strategies that allowed them to broach controversial subjects for mass audiences during the UPA-II regime in India.

Henri Lefebvre’nin, aşina olunanın aslında hiç de bilinmeyen olduğunu söylemesinde gündelik yaşamın bilindik ve rutin yönlerinde gizil olana işaret ettiği gibi, medyaya ilişkin olanı anlama çabasında da benzer bir aşinalık ve bilinmezlik ilişkisi bulunmaktadır. Gündüz kuşağında yayınlanan kadın  programları, bu anlamda çok bilinen, üzerine sayısız yorum yapılan ancak içinde pek çok soru barındıran bir konudur.
Pierre Bourdieu’nun Flaubert’ten aktardığı bir söz bu çalışmanın esas amacını dile getirmektedir: “Vasatı iyi betimlemek gerekir”. Çalışmada, kadın tartışma programlarının kamusal müzakere ortamı sunma ve bir tür kamusal katılım sağlama olanağı sorgulanmakta, programlarda ele alınan konuların ve bu konuları “konuşma” biçimlerinin, “kişisel olan politiktir” şiarıyla işaret edilen özel alana hapsedilmiş, “mahrem” meselelerin kamusal alanda konuşulur hale gelmesi ve politikleştirilmesini ne ölçüde karşıladığı tartışılmaktadır. Kadın programlarının geniş bir izleyici kitlesi için gündelik hayatın önemli bir parçası haline geldiği kabulüyle, geniş bir toplumsal ve kültürel bağlam içinden bir “televizyon vakası” anlaşılmak istenmektedir.

Kamusal-özel ikiliğine dair literatürün farklı argümanlarının aktarıldığı ve kadınların kamusal alanda varoluş mücadelesinin dinamiklerinim anlatıldığı, kuramsal tartışmalara ayrılan ve birinci ve ikinci bölümü içeren birinci kısmı takip eden ikinci kısımda metin analizi ve alan araştırmasından elde edilen nicel ve nitel veriler betimlenmekte ve yorumlanmaktadır. Metin analizine ayrılan ikinci kısım üçüncü bölümde izleyici tartışma programlarının ve kadın tartışma programlarının tarihsel gelişimi ve türsel özelliklerinin detaylı bilgisinin verilmesinin ardından kadın programlarının anlatısal özellikleri, katılım ve söylemsel açılma-kapanma stratejileri incelenmekte, Türkiye televizyonlarında yayınlanan üç “kadın tartışma programı”nın birer haftalık kayıtlarından elde edilen metinler analiz edilmektedir. Dördüncü  bölümde, kadın kamusallığı odaklı kuramsal çerçeve üzerine inşa edilen etnografik araştırma ile, kadın ve toplumsal cinsiyet ekseninde, medya ile dolayımlanmış gündelik hayat kültürünün yoğun bir betimlemesine ulaşılması hedeflenmektedir. Bütünlüklü bir etnografik analize ulaşmak için ‘çok yöntemlilik’ benimsenerek, alan araştırması kapsamında derinlemesine
görüşme, odak grup görüşme, katılımcı gözlem teknikleri ile elde edilen alan bulguları yorumlanmaktadır.

Abstract In the summer of 2008, the Saudi-owned, pan-Arab satellite television network Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC) aired a failed Turkish soap opera, Gümüş, as the Arabized Noor, creating an overnight sensation and a media panic. Arab news media attributed a wave of domestic violence and divorce to the series' handsome lead actor, and his character's romantic deportment. This article combines content analysis of Noor, examination of online discourses surrounding the series, and interviews with its producers. It explores women's use of new media forms—satellite television and the Internet—to articulate desire and discontent, and the media panic these expressions induced among social and religious conservatives. Opposition to Noor—and to the idolization of its male lead—invokes older notions of women's potent sexual desire as a threat to the social order, and justifies their containment and control. The series' ambiguity, like that of Turkey itself , invokes binaries of East and West, Islam and secularism, tradition and modernity enabling a range of commentary on the state of Arab society in general, and sexual relations in particular. The Noor phenomenon created a forum where conflicting notions of Middle Eastern identity, sexual agency and gender relations vie for dominance.

This book is based on a dissertation research project and thesis writing that lasted from 2004 to 2009. It is an ethnographic attempt to understand Turkey’s European Union negotiations process from they eyes of senior Turkish journalists. Justice and Development Party (AKP) is still in power. Its power base is stronger, and it defeated major traditional elites, including those who oppose it in the journalistic field and in the mean time, the party changed its orientation towards Middle East. The whole media ownership structure has also changed since this research was completed. What did not change is the role of Turkish journalism as political actors and their journalistic patterns. Mainstream Turkish journalism does have a new orientation but its journalistic discourses continue to be determined within the emerging political assemblage as it used to have happened...

In this essay, the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle serves as the conceptual template for an examination of otherness and authenticity as expressed through the narrative tropes of the arrival scene and the pedagogical breakthrough in fiction films that feature teachers as protagonists and ethnographies that foreground the ethnographer as subject.

The book Media Ethnographies: Towards an Anthropological Imagination of the Media and Communication is an integral presentation of six distinct studies, which were developed in the period between 2007 and 2017 in Slovenia. The book written in Slovenian language is provided by a brief ENGLISH SUMMARY (p. 349-354).

Bu makalede, toplumsal değişim ve dönüşümlerin medya aracılığıyla aktarılması, yansıtılması, temsili, kısaca yeniden oluşturulması sürecinin, televizyon izleme bağımlısı olmayanlar tarafından nasıl yaşandığının sorgulanması amaçlanmaktadır.

‘Social Transformation and Media: Nature Against Television’ is based on a wider audience research named ‘Social Transformations and Audience Participation in Turkish media’ and is focused mainly on the contrast of television and rural daily life. This part of the research has the findings of the update of a field research at villages on the relation between TV viewing and social change which was the main issue of the writer’s doctorate thesis 23 years ago. A new visit to the villages after all those years gave chance to compare the social transformation of daily practices in a mediated society. The aim of this article is to interrogate how the process of representation and reproduction of social transformation and social change in media is taking place at the rural life where the villagers are just light viewers of television.

Türk dizilerinin uluslararası başarısı üzerine yapılan akademik çalışmalar jeo-kültürel ve jeo-linguistik faktörlere; kültürel yakınlık, kültürel diploması ve küreselleşme gibi tartışmalara; prodüksiyon kalitesi ve modernlik imgeleri gibi unsurlara odaklanmış, tartışmalar ağırlıklı olarak ekonomi politik düzlemde yürütülmüştür. Ortadoğu, Balkanlar ve Latin Amerika’da saha çalışmalarına dayalı sınırlı sayıdaki araştırma ise bu coğrafyalarda izleyicinin Türk dizilerini izlemelerindeki temel motivasyonları, metinlerle kurulan ilişkileri ve yorumlama pratiklerini incelemiştir. Türk dizilerinin Nordik izleyici ile kültürel karşılaşmasına dair henüz bir saha araştırması yapılmamıştır. Bu araştırmada, Türk dizilerinin Nordik ülkelerin farklı etnik gruplara, yaş ve cinsiyete mensup izleyicileri tarafından nasıl alımlandığı temel sorusu, İsveç’te yapılacak bir saha araştırması üzerinden yanıtlanmak istenmektedir. Türk dizilerinin İsveç ulusal kanallarında yayınlanmaya başladığı 2013 yılından bugüne, yeni Türk dizilerinin gösterime girmeye devam etmesi ve yüksek izlenme oranlarına ulaşılması, dizilere izleyicinin ilgisini göstermektedir. İsveç’te artan oranda ilgi görmeye başlayan Türk dizilerine dair etnografik perspektifli bir alan araştırması, İsveç’te Türkiye imgesine ve Nordik ülkeler ile Türkiye’nin ulusaşırı (transnational) kültürel karşılaşmalarına dair önemli sorulara yanıt bulabilecektir. Araştırmada, izleyici alımlama analizi saha araştırması ve içerik analizi olmak üzere iki kısımdan oluşacaktır. Saha araştırması: İzleyici etnografisi ve satın alma sorumluları ile görüşmelerden; İçerik analizi: Quora soru-cevap portalı ve İsveç internet medyasının analizlerinden oluşacaktır. Ocak 2022- Ocak 2023 tarihleri ​​arasında yürütülmesi planlanan izleyici etnografisi kapsamında, Türk dizilerinin İsveç'teki izleyicileriyle derinlemesine görüşmeler ve odak-grup görüşmeleri yapılacaktır. İzleyici etnografisinin katılımcıları, Stockholm'de yaşayan Nordik ve Türkiye kökenli izleyiciler olacaktır. İçerik analizlerinin Haziran-Eylül 2022 tarihleri arasında yapılması planlanmaktadır. Niteliksel içerik analizi iki bileşenden oluşacaktır: İsveçli izleyicinin Türk dizileri hakkında yorumları ve görüşlerini internet mecrasında nasıl paylaştığını anlamak üzere, internet yayın platformu Quora’nın; ve Türk dizilerinin İsveç internet medyasında nasıl yer aldığını ve tartışıldığını ortaya çıkarmak üzere İsveç’teki çevrimiçi gazete, medya platformları ve haber portallarının analizi. Gelişime açık olan “Türkiye’de Nordik Çalışmaları” ve “İsveç’te Türkiye araştırmaları” alanlarına katkıda bulunması beklenen bu araştırma, medya çalışmaları alanının yanı sıra, kültürel sosyoloji, uluslararası ilişkiler ve sosyal antropoloji gibi alanlara da katkı sunabilecektir. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı ve Dışişleri Bakanlığı gibi kurumların ilgili birimleri ile araştırmanın çeşitli evrelerinde bilgi ve fikir alışverişinde bulunulması arzulanmaktadır. Araştırma bulguları sempozyum, konferans bildirisi, makale, gazete yazısı ve kitap bölümü olarak ulusal ve uluslararası düzlemde paylaşılacaktır. Araştırmanın nihai ürünü olarak, Türk Dizilerinin ulusaşırı izleyicileri üzerine araştırmalar yapan, dizi ihracatının ekonomi-politik yönlerini çalışan akademisyenlerin ve doktorantların katkılarına açık olacak bir İngilizce kitap projesi çalışması hayata geçirilecektir. Söz konusu kitap, alımlama odaklı bu araştırmanın tamamlanmasının ardından başlatılacak ve bir yıl sürecek ikinci bir araştırma projesinin tamamlanmasının ardından her iki proje bileşeninin ürünü olarak yayınlanacaktır. Araştırma, Stockholm’de bulunan Södertörn Üniversitesi, Kültür ve Eğitim Fakültesi, Medya ve İletişim Çalışmaları Bölümü’nün ev sahipliğinde yürütülecektir.

Title:  Cultural Hybridity, Global  Imagination, and Transnational Encounters: Audience Reception of Turkish TV Drama Series in Sweden

Abstract

Academic studies on the international success of Turkish TV series depend on geo-cultural and geo-linguistic factors; debates such as cultural proximity, cultural diplomacy, and globalization; focus on elements such as production quality and images of modernity, and the studies are mainly carried out with a political-economic perspective. Limited number of fieldwork-based research in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Latin America have investigated the motivations of the audience in watching Turkish TV series in these geographies, the relationships established with the texts, and the interpretation practices. It is seen that a field study regarding the cultural encounter of Turkish TV series with the Nordic audience has not been done yet. In this research, the main question of how Turkish TV series are received by the viewers of different ethnic groups, age, and gender in Nordic countries is aimed to be answered through a field study to be conducted in Sweden, Turkish TV series have been shown on Swedish national channels since 2013 and they achieve high viewing rates. That shows the interest of the Swedish audience in Turkish drama. A field study in Sweden, with an ethnographic perspective on Turkish TV series, which have started to attract an increasing attention of Swedish audience, will be able to find answers to the matters of great importance such as the image of Turkey in Sweden and the transnational cultural encounters of Nordic countries and Turkey. Audience reception analysis in the research will consist of two parts, field research and content analysis. Field research: Will consist of audience ethnography and interviews with buyers; Content analysis: Will consist of analyzes of Quora question-and-answer website and Swedish internet media. Within the audience ethnography, which is planned to be run between January 2022 and January 2023, in-depth interviews and focus-group discussions will be held with the Swedish audience of Turkish TV series. Participants of the audience ethnography will be audiences of Nordic and Turkish origin living in Stockholm. Content analyzes are planned to be carried out between June and September 2022. Qualitative content analysis will consist of two components: The internet broadcasting platform Quora, in order to understand how Swedish viewers share their comments and opinions about Turkish series on the internet and analysis of online newspapers, media platforms and news portals in Sweden to reveal how Turkish serials are covered and discussed in Swedish internet media. This research, which is expected to contribute to the fields of "Nordic Studies in Turkey'' and "Turkey Studies in Sweden"  that are open to development, will contribute to fields such as cultural sociology, international relations, and social anthropology, as well as the field of media studies. It is desirable to exchange information and ideas at various stages of the research with the relevant units of institutions, such as the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Research findings will be shared nationally and internationally as symposiums, conference proceedings, articles, newspaper articles and book chapters. As the final product of the research, an English book project study will be implemented, which will be open to the contributions of academics and PHD students  who do research on the transnational audience of Turkish TV series and study the economic-political aspects of TV series exports. The book will be launched after the completion of this reception-oriented research and will be published as the product of both project components after the completion of a second research project that will last for one year. The research will be hosted by Södertörn University, Faculty of Culture and Education, Department of Media and Communication Studies in Stockholm.

Kozinets’ Netnography: Doing ethnographic research online is a strong introductory text for those seeking to conduct Internet-based social research. It provides the reader with recommended steps to follow in formulating their own ‘netnographies’ (p. 4) from conception and design to implementation, making it a handy how-to-do guide geared towards students and practitioners who are mostly new to web-based ethnographic inquiry. Sections on research planning, methods and ethics serve to further ongoing debates among media ethnographers.

Учебное пособие адресовано государственным и муниципальным служащим, студентам высших учебных заведений, проходящим обучение по специальности «Государственное и муниципальное управление», слушателям курсов повышения квалификации и переподготовки специалистов в области государственной национальной политики. Содержание базируется на положениях Стратегии государственной национальной политики Российской Федерации на период до 2025 года, Стратегии национальной безо-
пасности Российской Федерации (2015) и Указа Президента РФ от 7 мая 2012 г. «Об обеспечении межнационального согласия». Пособие знакомит с основами государственной национальной политики Российской Федерации, её местом в жизни страны и в государственном управлении. В пособии затрагиваются также вопросы, связанные с профессиональным стандартом и подготовкой специалистов в области государственной национальной политики, стратегическим планированием государственной национальной политики, поддержкой этнокультурного развития и формированием российской идентичности.

Chile's public television station relies on a programming structure that places a telenovela before and after the national news hour. This programming model's popularity is due to what producers call its “umbrella effect,” meaning that the ratings of one program help to protect what comes before and after. In the months leading up to the 2009–10 presidential election, the station blurred the boundaries between these two televisual genres by producing one telenovela that parodied the inner workings of a news station and another that enlisted a well-known journalist to serve as its narrator. Drawing on fieldwork with media producers and telenovela fans, I argue that the overlaps between these two genres make visible the relation between media, political, and economic infrastructures. Analysis of these programming flows in the context of the electoral campaign provides insight into the role of transitions as places of politics making.

In this article I address the challenge of how to study media and actual social changes ethnographically. To do so I draw from the relevant media ethnography literature, including my own research in Malaysia and Spain. I argue that ethnographers are well positioned to contribute to the interdisciplinary study of media and social change. However, to do so we must first shift our current focus on media and 'social changing' (i.e. how things are always changing) to the study of media in relation to actual social changes, e.g. the suburbanisation of Kuala Lumpur in the 1970s to 2000s, the secularisation of morality in post-Franco Spain, or the success of new indignados parties in Spain's 2015 local government elections. This shift from the ethnographic present continuous to the past simple – a move from potential to actual changes – does not require that we abandon ethnography in favour of social history. Rather, it demands new forms of 'diachronic ethnography' that can handle the biographical, phase-by-phase logic of actual social changes. It also requires that we conduct not only multi-sited (Marcus, 1995) but also multi-timed fieldwork on specific congeries of media practices, forms and agents.

Over the past decade, computing devices and digital media platforms have entered the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese Internet users. From a privileged and expensive form of information access, shang wang (going online) has become an ordinary experience for an increasingly large percentage of the PRC's population. This momentuous change has been widely discussed under larger the narratives of ICT development or informational democratization, but the everyday lives of Chinese digital media users have been rarely approached anthropologically. This talk presents the results of an ongoing ethnographic research project following the variegated everyday media practices of Chinese digital media users, and focuses in particular on different forms of vernacular creativity. From slang terms to animated GIFs, from selfies to WeChat stickers, a large part of digital media content results from the everyday creative practices of users, and different forms of "doing" are behind the sociotechnical construction of vernacular repertoires of digital folklore. Drawing on years of participation in different digital media platforms and a long-term curatorial data collection, I will outline how the Chinese Internet reshapes the classical idea of anthropological fieldsite, discuss how to study the circulation of vernacular content in its own terms, and offer a few provisional conclusions on how local users experience, inhabit and shape the peculiar media ecologies of today's China.

In the 2010s, new forms of hand-to-hand digital media piracy displaced state control over media distribution in Cuba and facilitated the influx of global media, including K-Pop, just as Cuban socialism came under renewed pressure through economic reform. In this context, this article contends, Cuban youth turned to K-Pop to reimagine the self, sociality, and Cuba’s place in the world. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article shows how K-Pop appealed to fans by fostering fantasies of becoming enterprising individuals through neoliberal solidarity. These aspirations were reinforced by the industry’s pursuit of immediation, or its use of digital media to produce intimate and immediate connections that denied the mediations on which they depended. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how desires for and anxieties about immediacy motivate K-Pop fandom and its geo-political imaginaries and how a global capitalist culture industry can appeal to fans by offering relief from the neoliberal capitalism it reproduces.

This is the accepted version. The published version can be found at the following link (warning paywall): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13678779211024665?fbclid=IwAR3GV8tQMRrDE_Cd9yMnsgUZYaGsTgubgPOzfxwB4KS3W-b-nXlEwSm3qt8. Email me at lhumphreys@tulane.edu and I will be happy to send you the published version.

In this article, we introduce the Special Section on Extreme Speech and Global Digital Cultures by developing the concept of “extreme speech.” In addressing the growing cultures of online vitriol and extremism, this concept advances a critical ethnographic sensibility to situated online speech cultures and a comparative global conversation that moves beyond the legal-normative debates that have been dominant in North America and Europe. We demonstrate this intervention by highlighting three interlinked arguments: Extreme speech inhabits a spectrum of practices rather than a binary opposition between acceptable and unacceptable speech; the sociotechnological aspects of new media embody a context in itself; and the violence of extreme speech acts is productive of identity in historically specific ways. This approach entails a methodological move that takes account of the meanings online users attach to vitriol as historical actors. It thus allows for critical frameworks to emerge from emic terms of action rather than moral concepts superimposed from the outside. Ethnographic explorations of extreme speech, we suggest, open up a new avenue to critique the contemporary global conjuncture of exclusionary politics.

There has in recent years been a growing interest in media and the senses. Yet there has to date been no sustained focus on the implications of existing approaches to the senses for how we understand this relationship. In this article I demonstrate how contemporary debates rooted in, but by no means exclusive to, anthropology that pivot around concepts of culture, representation and experience can inform the ways we might conceptualise the relationship between media and senses. I explore the tensions between and analytical consequences of, on the one hand culturalist approaches to both the senses and to media, and on the other phenomenological approaches. Such debates moreover reveal the need to explore further how the relationality between representational and non-representational elements of media and content might be articulated.

Basierend auf einer Medienethnographie zum Video-Genre „YouTubePoop“, fragt der Artikel nach der Vereinbarkeit einer empirischen Herangehensweise an digitale Medienaneignung mit einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Deutung derselben. Die Metaphorisierung von „Remix“ und „Mashups“ wird dabei hinsichtlich des Verhältnisses von medialer Hybridität und Integrität als Verhandlungsort von kulturellen Hierarchien kritisch durchleuchten. Wie werden anhand der beiden Begriffe Wertigkeiten von Originalität und Kreativität perpetuiert, die die Praktiken auf den ersten Blick zu überwinden scheinen? Als möglicher Lösungsansatz plädiert der Artikel für eine empirische Auseinandersetzung, die die Praktiken jenseits von universalen Kulturpraktiken in ihrer spezifischen kulturellen Situiertheit analysiert.

This article introduces the term 'the ethnographic moment', which takes up and 'plays' with the long-disputed 'ethnographic present' in anthropology, as an indicator of changing conditions and requirements for ethnography in the context of mass media and mediation. It argues that event and debate, rather than structure and practice, have become pivotal aspects in thinking and conducting fieldwork that has to deal with the ephemeral. At the same time, it tries to show that an unquestioning acceptance of technological advancement and speed of societal change immunizes us to the thinkable absence of media and obscures analysis of lasting states of injustice and inequality in whose (re-) production they have a stake.

Keywords: anthropology, media contents, social change, technology, time

https://www.westminsterpapers.org/25/volume/9/issue/3/

This publication offers a comprehensive and multispatial analysis of transnational life across the highly mediated worlds where diaspora is lived and imagined. In a detailed and stimulating discussion, the author unravels processes of diasporic identity ...

This article examines debates around Chile’s digital television transition in order to trace the socio-historical relation between piracy and social change. During the military dictatorship, media activists used what they called “honorable piracy” for counter-communication efforts aimed at restoring democracy. Following the return to democracy, community television participants have rationalized their unauthorized transmission of alternative programming to low-income sectors using a similar logic of honorable piracy. For these community television participants, the digital transition represented the possibility of redefining democratic access to the public sphere and attaining legal recognition. Through an analysis of citizen activism around the move from analog to digital television, this article argues that discussion of piracy emerges as an expression of conflicting notions of the definition, use, and distribution of public resources.

Labor Behind the Drama: Rating System, Working Conditions and Unionization in Turkish Soap Opera Industry Through the concept and the experience of precarity, this article investigates the impact of rating system on the working conditions within Turkey's soap opera industry. Drawing on the findings from a fieldwork involving 26 participants, the article argues that precarity in this sector differs from that defined within contemporary studies on precarious media labor. Rather than a purely economic phenomenon, it is crucial to grasp soap opera precarity with its bodily, physical and legal dimensions. Additionally, the article suggests that workers in this sector are neither victims of their passion for the job, which leads to self-exploitation, nor do they fall prey to precarity. On the contrary, they resist precarious labor conditions. Campaigns targeting precarity and adverse working conditions in the industry are examined in this study. Ultimately, it is observed that organization attempts in this sector unfold differently than horizontal organizations resisting precarity. Unionization within this sector aims to convince the state to recognize performers, actors, provide professional definitions, and prevent workplace accidents, which at times do lead to deaths. Résumé Le travail derrière le drame : le système de mesure d'audience, les conditions de travail et les activités de syndicalisation dans l'industrie de série télévisée en Turquie

This paper aims to explore the notion of presentism as a way of looking at the fraught temporalities of the post-/de- ‘pre-fixing frontier’ in colonialism studies. Drawing on various interpretations of the concept, presentism can be said to manifest when societies become unable to imagine a future or a past, because of structured powers keen on preserving the status quo. Using a combination of data from media ethnography and literary criticism, we intend to assess the productivity of an updated notion of presentism for the ongoing debates on the coloniality of power. Instances of arrested and recursive temporalities exemplified in recent Anglophone African novels as well as in Swedish media discourses on migration will serve as case studies. Issues of memory and denial, as well as the ideological claim that enduring phenomena such as immigration should be considered symptoms of a contemporary migratory crisis, will be at the centre of our investigation.

Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article shows how the human subjects of audience studies and production studies might be studied together to reveal the power relations involved in mass media production processes. In this particular case study, fans and extras for the television series Treme (2010–2013) shared a discourse around the place of viewing and making which strove to articulate a common culture despite the real hierarchical barriers between audiences and production personnel.