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- Volume 10, Issue 2, 2014
International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2014
Volume 10, Issue 2, 2014
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‘Give us bread, but give us roses’: Gender and labour in the digital economy
More LessAbstractThis article provides an overview of contemporary scholarship in information and communication studies on labour and gender in the digital economy. It also discusses recent feminist perspectives on social media attributes around labour, including the paucity of women working in the social media industry, and the gendered dimension of young unpaid interns. Control of the means of communication and production is a dominant and perturbing theme throughout much of the research and activism. The article concludes with suggested venues of further research for students and scholars in order to energize pedagogy and practice in critical communication studies.
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The governance of communication networks: Reconsidering the research agenda
More LessAbstractGovernance arrangements have multiple implications for the norms and practices that influence citizen access to networks, opportunities for freedom of expression, and privacy. This article sets out a research agenda aimed at examining new forms of collective action in practice with a particular focus on how choices are limited by different norms concerning authority and the way these norms are institutionalized in the case of communication network governance. Systematic comparative studies of how governance is constituted in practice are likely to yield insight into how asymmetrical power relations are being played out in a variety of policy forums and how certain norms and practices are becoming standardized with outcomes that frequently depart from idealized visions of the governance process.
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Free-media-speech: Free speech and public media
More LessAbstractWhile much writing about free speech focuses on the legal constraints on expression and matters of state censorship, free speech also entails positive obligations on the state to create the conditions for diverse public communication. This article explores how the rationales for free speech support, and indeed require, public media. For mediated communication, free speech involves the promotion of diversity in speakers, topics, audiences and modes of address. All this requires more than commonly repeated debates that are framed in terms of industry dynamics and related regulatory options. It requires media free speech.
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Ecomedia futures
By Sean CubittAbstractStudies of environmentalism in media and cultural studies have largely focused on the communication of political strategies and scientific truths, on representation, and on genre and thematic criticism. This article looks at current work on the environmental impacts of digital media and argues that this gives a new perspective on political economy of communications, media ethics and aesthetic forms
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Media and culture: Movement across the decades
By David RoweAbstractOver the last decade there have been well-documented, far-reaching changes to the media environment as digitalization – among other forces and processes – has substantially altered media production, consumption and use. A notable consequence of this shift has been the intensified co-dependency of the media and (especially ‘live’) sport, and the continuing expansion of the ‘media sports cultural complex’. The developing phenomenon of social media now figures prominently across the cultural sphere (including the ‘zone’ of media and sport), but it is necessary to question some ostensibly over-optimistic or premature claims about its lasting significance as a vehicle for human liberation. Thus, in considering a broad research agenda in this domain for the next decade, the centrality of political economy, media history, and anti-technological determinism are emphasized as necessary components of any workable analytical engagement with questions of power, media and cultural politics.
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‘Awaken your incredible’: Love your body discourses and postfeminist contradictions
Authors: Rosalind Gill and Ana Sofia EliasAbstractIn this article we focus on a new yet under-examined cultural phenomenon: the turn to ‘Love your body’ (LYB) discourses. Taking a feminist critical standpoint, we move away from an affirmative reading of LYB discourses and instead understand them as a postfeminist articulation of sexism. Our analysis identifies the key motifs of LYB discourses and contextualizes their dramatic proliferation over the last decade. Situated at the historical convergence of neoliberal governmentality, emotional capitalism, the growth of social media and commodity feminism, we trace how LYB discourses have emerged within the advertising genre to quickly saturate media more broadly. The article concludes with a critical assessment of LYB discourses that seeks to flesh out its distinctive contradictions and its ideological workings. In so doing, we will argue that far from representing a liberation from harmful beauty standards, LYB discourses are implicated in a deeper and more pernicious regulation of women that has shifted from bodily to psychic regulation.
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Critical political economy of communications: A mid-term review
More LessAbstractIf we take the late 1960s as a starting point, an explicitly defined ‘critical political economy of communications’ is nearly 50 years old. How salient today are the core concerns that shaped this tradition? What are the emergent themes in contemporary critical media studies? While critical political economy’s attention to the way media industries are organized and financed has become a more central consideration across the field of media and communication studies, this mainstreaming has been accompanied by disconnection from the critical political economy tradition. Reviewing that paradox, the article identifies emergent research themes and argues for the relevance of critical political economy approaches for contemporary investigations into the problems of the media.
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Arguing the case of the ‘Janus element’ in journalism education: Journalism history as essential element in journalism curricula in developing democracies
By Lizette RabeAbstractThis article argues the case for the inclusion of an essential element in Journalism curricula in post-colonial countries struggling to deepen a democratic dispensation: Journalism History. The article contends that what the author calls the ‘Janus factor’, namely a layered understanding of the past as it presents itself as the present, and the ability to think inclusively by facing inward and outward at the same time, is essential as a conceptual or higher-order tool to enable journalists to report with insight on political, social, cultural and economic realities for their various audiences, taking into account continuous interactions between politics, economics, culture and technology. This is especially crucial in one-party-dominated ‘democracies’ and in order to fulfil the role of the media as a ‘public trust’. In these fragile democracies, contested histories are significant factors having an impact on daily narratives. Added to this, the impact of the current disruptive digital (media) economy, which causes understaffed newsrooms, further hinders comprehensive reportage in fragile post-colonial democracies, such as South Africa, and hence the need for journalists to have an understanding of their own profession and its role in past and present realities.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Dr Andrea Insch, Lars Lundgren and Juan Luis ManfrediAbstractBranding the Nation – The Global Business of National Identity, Melissa Aronczyk (2013) New York: Oxford University Press, 256 pp. IBSN 978-0-19-975216-4 (hbk) IBSN 978-0-19-975217-1 (pbk), £16.99
Europe – On Air, Suzanne Lommers (2012) Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 326 pp. ISBN: 9789089644350 (pbk), €39,95
Franco sells Spain to America: Hollywood, tourism and public relations as postwar Spanish soft power, Neal M. Rosendorf (2014) Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 304 pp. ISBN-10: 1137299282 ISBN-13: 978-1137299284 (hbk), €74,93
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 19 (2023)
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Volume 18 (2022)
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Volume 17 (2021)
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Volume 16 (2020)
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Volume 15 (2019)
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Volume 14 (2018)
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Volume 13 (2017)
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Volume 12 (2016)
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Volume 11 (2015)
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Volume 10 (2014)
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Volume 9 (2013)
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Volume 8 (2012)
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Volume 7 (2011)
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Volume 6 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 5 (2009)
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Volume 4 (2008)
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Volume 3 (2007)
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Volume 2 (2006 - 2007)
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Volume 1 (2005)