ABSTRACT. This paper explores practices of hope (personal, professional and sectoral) that freelance workers in the creative industries performed in response to the ongoing uncertainty of COVID19. We borrow from Alacovska’s ‘hopeful sociology’ and stress that these practices of hope were relational, responsive to broad political narratives, and changed through time. With many of the identifiers and possibilities of the deferred economy stripped away or indefinitely postponed, alternate deployments of hope become more visible through what Chen (2021, 3) describes as ‘playing, creating and waiting’ and as an embodiment of freelancers as social or civic actors. We approach this study of hope by looking at the strategies that freelancers used to amplify and collectivise their voices, which they understood to be historically silenced in the industry. In our observation, the collective expressions of hope at the sectoral level fractured, rendering personal and professional optimism more vulnerable. These fractures, vulnerabilities and limitations have material influence on the success of wider cultural activism and related networks of mutual care. The data for this paper are drawn from a UK-wide rapid response study conducted with theatre freelancers between August 2020 and December 2021

ABSTRACT. When the UK went into lockdown in March 2020, journalists were identified as providing an essential service that must be maintained. News organisations had little time to plan how they would fulfil their duty whilst protecting employees and the public from infection. To avoid the risks of travelling between areas and meeting face-to-face, remote interviewing became the norm. Using video conferencing and calling apps, such as Zoom and FaceTime, TV reporters can secure the contributions they need for their packages and live programmes from a safe location. But what impact has this had on who is heard during this unprecedented time? Has remote interviewing promoted voices from outside of the mainstream or made journalists lean more heavily on elite actors? Existing research has looked at the capacity for digital media to diversify news sources and increase public engagement in journalism. There is less research on contributors to TV news and nothing specifically on remote interviewing. To address this gap, I carried out a comparative content analysis of the output of BBC and ITV national and regional news programmes, taking samples from the same periods of the year before and after the outbreak of Covid-19, to measure the growth and impact of remote interviewing. A huge increase in remote interviews was seen once the pandemic had begun. More significantly, the proportion of interviews carried out with non-elite sources grew from 55% to 65% across the sample and from 57% to 72% for one of the programmes.

ABSTRACT. The COVID pandemic has forced an acceleration of the adoption of certain kinds of flexible working (home-working and flexible hours in particular) but been combined with enormous challenges that fall disproportionately on women (childcare and increased share of domestic labour). How television and other creative industries recover in the post-COVID period thus carries both major opportunity and major risk for its impacts on gendered outcomes within television work: on the one hand, the opportunity to institutionalise family-friendly modes of work that reduce gendered inequalities (Hupkau and Petrongolo 2021); and on the other, risk that existing patterns of inequality based upon the unequal distribution of unpaid socially reproductive labour will be further entrenched. This paper is based upon a survey of mothers working in television carried out in March 2021 and (ongoing) follow-up interviews. Findings show the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on the ability of mothers to work, and the negative impact on mental health and well-being. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates the additional burden of women’s caring responsibilities and intersection with demographic, spatial and structural inequalities, and in doing so raises further questions about how these pressures might be ameliorated in the post-Covid workplace. We argue that the relative (in)compatibility of television labour with unpaid, socially reproductive labour is an expression of both the erosion of the ‘social contract’ and the gendered dimensions of unequal labour relations in the creative industries. The result is a silencing of the voice of mothers within UK TV.

ABSTRACT. The mediatisation of public cultures has undergone rapid changes in the pandemic. Pre-existing trends have been reinforced and become intertwined with configurations of the crisis, while new forms of engagement and participation have emerged in response to the moment which has been particularly disruptive for creative organisations and practitioners. This paper focuses on digital media practices and shared notions of time in the context of Caribbean Carnivals in the UK. The approach draws on the conceptual framework of ‘creolising Europe’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Tate 2015) and seeks to highlight how notions of belonging are negotiated in temporalizing media practices, based on an understanding that the cultural dynamics of digitalisation are immanently constituted by raciality and post/coloniality. The seasonal arrangement of Carnival relies on all-year round, often uncompensated labour as well as financial, social and emotional investment, which are largely rendered invisible as the marketable elements have become dominant due to Carnival's incorporation into the neoliberal cultural economy. Applying a non-media centric, practice-oriented approach of digital ethnography (Pink/Postill 2012; Burchell et al 2020) allows insights into continuities between online and offline sites as well as how participants experience forms of participation on digital platforms. Reflecting on the seasons since the cancellation of parades in 2020, the paper presents preliminary results of an ethnographic research study with carnivalists on their digital media practices.

ABSTRACT. Beer is an essential component of masculinities in many alcohol consuming nations; from Scotland; to South Africa; to Mexico (Gomez-Corona et al. 2016, Hunt et al. 2013, Mager 2010). This symbol, often enshrined in media, is strengthened by its accessibility - regardless of age, disability, race or class it is possible to partake. Counter to this possibility of equality, often championed by industry, this research posits that the masculinity communicated around beer consumption through Western screen media is often exclusionary, reproducing wider cultural inequalities.

Employing a multi-modal approach to critical discourse analysis, this paper will analyse selected scenes from the works of auteur director David Lynch, focusing on beer consumption and related activities. With strong links to the brewing industry due to multiple collaborations with controversial brewery Mikkeller (Bailey 2021), this view of masculine identity has particular relevance for today’s craft beer community. Through exploration of the gendered meanings conveyed on screen in relation to beer, and how this intersects with other aspects of socio-political identity, this paper will analyse resulting inequalities, demonstrating the hegemonic nature of consumption.

ABSTRACT. Within China’s secondary education system, heavy academic pressure determines that most students are unable to invest time to develop a variety of personal hobbies. Under this circumstance, high-quality sports content provided by international professional leagues, such as the NBA, constitutes an important aspect of many male students’ daily entertainment consumption. For these students, watching NBA games and engaging in discussions about elite plays on social media offer an important ‘refuge’, which allows them to release stress and manage friendships with peers that define aspects of who they are outside of their academic life. In this article, we provide an analysis of male Chinese basketball spectators’ self-reflective consumption of sport, using secondary school NBA fans as a case study. Drawing on focus groups of 23 participants, we argue that elite NBA athletes represent an important type of male ideals, which is reconstructed by young male Chinese sports fans to define ideal masculinities. In this process, these male fans often engage in a double-standard practice, which is shown as their acceptance of the CP rhetoric to slash elite athletes and their dismissal of female audiences’ seemingly similar application of the rhetoric. Such a double-standard practice reveals male spectators’ attempt to monopolise the interpretation of masculinity in sport. It underscores men’s rejection of any challenge that destabilises existing gender power relations in sports fandom, which is in line with gender politics unfolding in wider Chinese society.

ABSTRACT. This paper will examine the emergence of fan-produced digital platforms and their position in the football media landscape in what has become an increasingly competitive environment for audience share. The growing prominence of digital fan media comes at a time when digitisation has seen a shift in production techniques and changing consumption habits while enabling new voices to be heard. This has contributed to the redefinition of the relationship between content producers and users that is challenging some of football’s traditional reporting practice (Randles 2022). A dissatisfaction with mainstream media can see parallels drawn with the fanzine counter-culture of the mid to late 80’s in what Boyle (2006: 142) describes as ‘a long tradition of dissent’ with fan communities moving online. A lack of confidence in football journalism to provide deeper enquiry has provided an opportunity for fan content producers to react to the perceived failings of professional coverage while enhancing their own prestige and authority (McEnnis 2022). Exploring areas including the digital transformation of the sports media environment, the paper will draw on findings from interviews with founders of prominent digital fan media platforms to discuss how new technologies have empowered fan voice while challenging the professional identity of football journalists.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the perceptions of resident migrant communities in Milan’s diverse areas of ‘Zona 2’ and ‘Zona 9’ regarding the current ‘migration crisis’; and aims to determine whether growing discrimination has produced communal solidarity or purposeful disengagement in the affected communities. What the research showed, through participant observation conducted in various households in Milan, is a sense of close affinity that established immigrati/e feel with ‘new migrants’: not because of the journeys they have taken to reach Italy, but the same sense of ‘Otherness’ and marginalisation that the former group believes the latter will experience during their stay in Italy. This almost constitutes a warning of future alienation, and the impossibility to progress on a social level. The respondents reflected on their public narrative being fixated on them embodying the ‘Other’, and therefore they also rejected any type of affiliation to the idea of ‘Italianness’. This was mostly due to the perceived unfairness and exclusion that most of the participants witnessed while residing in Milan, experiences that represented forms of oppression, voicelessness and epistemic violence that silenced them. It was because of these feelings that the interviewed participants transferred their own ‘baggage of oppression’ onto the migrants that they saw arriving to Italy in dinghies in the ‘voiceless images’ on TV, newspapers or social media. Their revealed perception of the ‘migration crisis’ clarified their own marginalisation in Italy.

ABSTRACT. Understanding how media agendas are built requires comprehending the interplay between issues (content), events (time) and social actors (Luhmann, 1997; Gerhards, 1993; Otto, 2001). Issues appear in the news media as a consequence of events, that is to say, “something (non-trivial) happening in a certain place at a certain time” (Yang et al., 1999, 34). Does it therefore follow that Islam is depicted as violent because the media is particularly likely to report on Muslims when covering terror attacks? In spite of the relevance of events in this matter, most studies on media representations of Islam and Muslims focus exclusively on content. This study aims to fill this gap by analyzing news waves and the key events behind them in the quality press of the United Kingdom, Germany and France from 2000 to 2020. An automated content analysis of newspaper articles (n=275,319) revealed that not all news waves on Islam and Muslims are generated by terror attacks, and nor do these key events necessarily lead to the framing of Islam or Muslims as terroristic. Rather, events prompt the emergence in the public sphere of an array of narratives about Islam, the character of which is not necessarily determined by the events. Furthermore, news waves differ in form across the three countries, and the type of event (for instance, terror attack or symbolic crisis) plays a pivotal role in the intensity of the news waves.

ABSTRACT. The media in Zimbabwe has been stringently controlled by the government since the colonial era. Censorship of media content was the order of the day supported by legislation such as the Official Secrets Act. At independence, television and radio broadcasting outlets were kept under firm government control with only a few private print publications allowed to operate. Legislation such as the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the Public Order and Security Act and the Broadcast Act compounded by mandatory registration for journalists and media houses with the Zimbabwe Media Commission contribute to silencing dissenting voices. Media houses whose journalists fail to exercise self censorship risk being denied reregistration at the expiry of their licenses. Anti-government activist and mainstream political opposition voices find expression online, particularly on social media. Far from being a free and liberated space, platforms such as Facebook, twitter, YouTube etc are the sites of robust and at times violent contestation, including counter-narratives, smear campaigns and hate speech, sometimes followed by threats and episodes of physical violence. Through a critical analysis of selected online texts complemented by semi-structured interviews, the present paper explores the theme of self-censorship by Zimbabwean journalists, activists and dissidents. Data is analysed qualitatively and thematically.

ABSTRACT. Police audit videos have their origins in the so-called First Amendment audits or citizen audits that have become popular in recent years in the US vlogosphere. They generally feature working-class men armed with cameras or mobile phones seeking to provoke confrontation with police officers over their right to move around and film outside police stations. Now the genre has glocalised to the UK, where auditing channels on YouTube including Auditing Britain, Koleeberks, and Marti Blagborough have attracted tens of thousands of subscribers. Audit videos in general have received minimal academic attention and what studies do exist have focused on the American context and on questions of legality (Dewbury 2020).

This paper discusses British police audit videos as an expression of working-class, investigative parajournalism that revels in the temporary, often humorous inversion of social hierarchy in a carnivalesque mode (Stallybrass and White 1986). More specifically, it is argued that police audit videos can be understood as a form of counter-surveillance, reversing the panoptical spectacles of working-class criminality that have been exploited and normalised in reality television documentaries such as Police Interceptors (Channel 5, 2008-) over recent decades (Newman 2020). Finally, while fully acknowledging their problematic features, such as their tendency to androcentrism and extreme subjectivism, it is suggested that police audit videos can constitute a form of popular anti-authoritarian praxis. At their most political, they can help to expose questionable policing practices and even highlight larger issues of social inequality and injustice.

ABSTRACT. Journalists can use sources to ensure objectivity, expertise and accuracy. It has long been recognised that journalistic sources can be considered “official” and can establish an initial interpretation of a topic, providing its primary definitions. Further, such accepted sources can be given the final word in copy. Sources not considered official are utilised through case studies to provide human interest experience and bring emotion to complicated topics such as economics. This paper argues that people with direct lived experience of poverty should be considered expert sources. It posits that those who navigate the complicated welfare system have useful knowledge which can challenge and develop the contribution of “official” sources. It posits that, rather than receive constant advice on, for example, budgeting, interviews with people with direct lived experience of poverty could ensure accuracy, avoid insensitivity and support objectivity. It further suggests that the inclusion of such experts could change the primary definitions around the experience of poverty and, as such, enrich copy and broaden its ever-present debate. Such inclusion could further ensure poverty is not observed but presents its subjects as experts with journalistic value. By producing new rules in the National Union of Journalists, supported by a guide produced in 2020 in collaboration with Joseph Rowntree Foundation, my campaigning research works towards creating this new approach to sources. This research hopes to develop inclusion of these silenced sources, particularly during economic crises.

ABSTRACT. Over the last 18 months we – a journalist and reportage illustrator – have been visiting and reporting on coastal communities that have been hit hard socially, economically and ecologically by austerity (House of Lords Select Committee, 2019), Brexit (Hanretty, 2018), the climate emergency and longer-term industrial decline. This paper is a critical self-reflection of our autoethnographic and practice-based research methodologies. We consider the importance of ‘polyphonic representation’ (Canevacci, 2012) as an ethical antidote to the problematic fetishizing of poverty and social despair (Pratt, 1992) that characterises much media coverage of marginalised coastal communities. Moreover, we explore the relevance to our work of Michael Taussig’s (2011) observation that a drawing is an articulation of the experience of seeing and witnessing, and the concomitant that in situ artists must be mindful of the potential impacts of their field research on the people and places they are representing. Our paper will include both readings and presentations of illustrations from our forthcoming book Coast of Teeth.

ABSTRACT. This paper will analyse from a journalistic producer perspective the ways in which media spheres and social-political marginalization are interlinked in the formation of marginalized identities of particular communities. As case studies we choose two regions regularly considered as ‘left behind’: East Germany (representing the territory of the former GDR) and North East England.

Despite sharing a history of deindustrialization in the past decades, both regions represent very different cases in their economic and political developments. Both regions have seen an emergence of right-wing populist parties and movements rising since 2015, fuelled in large part by anti-immigrant political rhetoric. In East Germany, the AfD achieves on average twice as high a share of the vote as in the West, the cause of which is also identified in the socio-economic West-East disparities as a historical legacy of German division. Both countries share a public service broadcasting system; differ, however, considerably in the commercial press market.

With Michel Foucault (1982), we assume communication produces and mirrors social practices. Marginalized communities can construct a collective identity of socially, geographically or symbolically excluded people for themselves; and they are also perceived as a collective by their environment and constructed as such. Marginalization is thus perpetuated in discourse, and structures of public communication.

Informed by a prior qualitative discourse analysis of mass-mediated content and drawing on interviews with news producers in both regions, this paper explores this topic from a newsroom angle. Subsequently, it contextualizes the discursive construction of regional marginalized identities within regional news.

ABSTRACT. In recent years, the ethical integrity of anthropological and ethnographic material deeply rooted in colonial endeavours has started to be questioned and challenged. The ongoing debate within the postcolonial critical thinking framework – focusing on unpacking the cultural, political, and economical legacy of the exploitation processes embedded in the colonial ruling – has not spared ethnographic and ethnological cultural institutions. Embedded in these critical accounts is the asymmetrical power relationship with colonised people.

Our paper is looking at films from the substantial visual collection of Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, in particular a series of early anthropological films from the 1920s and 1930s, many generated in ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in areas directly and indirectly ruled by the British Empire. The documentaries of two women anthropologists, Beatrice Blackwood and Ursula Graham Bower, filmed respectively in New Guinea and Northeast India, are subjected to a close textual and contextual analysis. In both sets of films, albeit in different ways, ‘the ethnographer eye’ plays a crucial role in reinforcing the asymmetrical power relationship.

We have devised a critical postcolonial framework to identify the colonial traces in these films and the reuse that has been made of them: the anthropologists’ subjectivity, external perception, state of exception, authenticity and filmcraft, use and reuse and reproduction of colonial bias. Our work emerges from the European-wide project ‘Polyvocal Interpretation of Contested Colonial Heritage (PICCH), which is supporting Pitt Rivers Museum and its archive in accelerating its process of decolonisation.

ABSTRACT. Compared to other countries of the former Soviet bloc, Romania did not experience many large-scale resistance movements until the Revolution in 1989. This paper explores vernacular photography as a form of opposition and survival to the regime. As one of the most repressive dictatorships of Eastern Europe, Romania’s communist past was characterised by the (neo-)Stalinist ideological system of fear, coercion and austerity, most often remembered for the last decade of Ceauşescu’s regime, when empty shelves, blackouts, petrol shortages and cold apartments dominated people’s perception of time. Although the all-powerful secret police, the Securitate, silenced people’s voices from speaking out and protesting against the grim conditions, this paper argues that people used vernacular photography as a tool to ‘speak out’ and contest the regime in subtle ways. Since owning a camera was not prohibited, photography created ‘free spaces’ in which people photographed their everyday lives and personal stories, thereby challenging the propaganda about the ‘Ceauşescu reality’.

Taking photography’s mnemonic property into account, this paper examines the camera not as a neutral recording device. Rather, it frames photography as an ongoing event that is entangled in webs of power, dialogue, resistance and agency, and involves several choices, meanings and social actors. By highlighting the complexity of vernacular photography, the paper aims to reveal untold narratives, silenced voices and repressed histories of Romania’s communist past, offer different interpretations of the past and orientate them towards the future. In so doing, the paper sheds light on photography in communist Romania, an underexplored research area.

ABSTRACT. As the anti-slavery movement gained momentum in England, colonies appointed Protectors of Slaves to oversee the gradual transition to the full-fledged abolition of slavery (Blouet, 1990, Yank, 2019). Mauritius became a place of conflicting colonial powers due to The 1810 Act of Capitulation which ensured the transfer of French Mauritius to Britain with minimal interference from the British colonial powers over the “white population of mainly 8,000 expatriate Frenchmen and the descendants of French planters” (Burroughs, 1976: 244), culminating in a “sharper edge and more seditious overtones […] than in most of the West Indian colonies” (ibid).

Using the above historical event as its backdrop, this paper examines the different ways in which newspapers in colonial Mauritius and Britain framed the arrival of John Jeremie as the Protector of Slaves in 1832 and the ensuing rebellion by the French slave-owning population against the British colonial powers. By focusing on articles published in the months of May and June 1832 from Le Cernéen newspaper in Mauritius and a range of regional and national newspaper in the UK between October and November 1832, the study investigates the lexical choice of the British press and Mauritian French press in “framing images of reality in a predictable and patterned way” (McQuail, 1994: 331) to highlight the anti-abolition stance of the French plantation owners in Mauritius. This paper argues, lexical choice needs to be seen as a powerful mechanism through which the ideological position of the pro-slavery Plantocracy could be foregrounded.

ABSTRACT. Since at least the 1970s, the Natural History genre has been dominated by the BBC’s Natural History Unit (NHU), principally through a succession of ‘landmark’ series – from Life on Earth (1979) to The Green Planet (2022). These series have shaped public perceptions of nature, offering a supposedly impartial and objective understanding of the natural world (based on science) buttressed by the authority of the BBC and David Attenborough as a ‘trusted’ presenter. BBC Studios has marketed these ‘high end’ aural and visual spectacles series aggressively as a global brand, winning numerous awards and accolades. This paper considers the implications of NHU’s apolitical brand dominance, the ways in which it has silenced or marginalised dissenting voices both within the BBC, in the sector and in the countries in which the films are made. It explores why and how the sector is beginning to include ‘alternative’ voices through co-creation with in-country peoples. Applying insight from an industry-embedded PhD project, the paper will analyse factors which have precipitated sector shifts towards more inclusive production systems, from the Covid-19 pandemic to broadcaster policy change, before concluding with a summary of how practice-based research can interrogate the inclusivity of these developments.

ABSTRACT. This panel seeks to discuss Muslims’ current position in Western public spheres. Research has long highlighted Muslims’ often stereotypical and pejorative representations in Western media. More recent research has also started to analyse and stress Muslims’ agency and voice in emerging digital publics that potentially facilitate self-representation and empowerment. This panel contributes to the ongoing discussion by exploring questions such as: How are Muslims currently represented in Western mainstream media? How can journalists contribute to greater inclusivity and diversity? And how far have digital publics and social media allowed for greater voice and Muslim empowerment? Notably, this panel also aims to further discuss and provide fresh insights into these questions at a time where societal polarisation and public acts of Islamophobia are increasing in Western societies.

ABSTRACT. In media representations and popular memory, the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence has become synonymous with grassroots activism and political participation. An apparent revival of participation in the streets and across online media platforms has repeatedly been framed as a success in mobilising ‘forgotten’ segments of the national community in media and public debate. Although high voter turnout and rising party memberships after the referendum suggest shifts in political interest and activism among the population, portrayals of grassroots participation in media representations of the referendum have frequently ignored what has since been termed the ‘silent majority’ of No voters as well as the ‘missing millions’ of non-voters (Hassan, 2014; Sullivan, 2014; Introna, 2016). Ensuing narratives on the referendum have often been restrictive – in terms of linguistic community, gender representation, socio-economic background, political affiliation and democratic participation.

Against this backdrop, this paper scrutinises the interplay between elite media representations, official campaigning politics and grassroots activism in order to trace the ‘hidden’ stories and ‘missing’ voices of the public debate. By critically comparing newspaper representations and their portrayal of grassroots activism and participation to personal stories and memories by members of the public, this paper challenges the discursive performance of elite narratives of the referendum campaign across competing media outlets. Based on the critical analysis and contextualisation of the public debate, this paper argues that instead of facilitating participation and empowerment among the wider population, long-standing narratives of national(ist) self-identification were routinely performed (Billig, 1995) in media representations of the referendum.

ABSTRACT. Public service broadcasting (PSB) in the UK faces significant, perhaps even existential, challenges. Rapid changes in media platforms and technologies, rampant competition from new media producers and a widening generational gap in the appeal of ‘traditional’ broadcasters (and public service news in particular) have all transformed how audiences find, consume and value media content. Despite its relative success in a diverse news media landscape beset by issues of mistrust, misinformation and hyper-partisanship around the globe, the future sustainability of the UK’s mixed PSB model is increasingly open to question.

Addressing pertinent public debates, we outline a framework of six different public values of PSB - social, cultural, economic, industrial, representational and civic - indicative of distinct principles and obligations evident across current UK policymaking and regulation. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with policymakers, stakeholders and audience groups, together with a close, qualitative reading of over 20 years of policy documents, we explore how this typology can inform a more nuanced understanding of how value conceptions have been strategically operationalised.

More specifically, on this evidential basis we analyse the constraints, risks and opportunities for redefining the guiding tenants of PSB policymaking within new media ecologies. In striving to rethink familiar conceptions of ‘the public interest,’ we argue a public value-centred approach to PSB may enrich civic engagement, with far-reaching implications for popular participation in media commissioning, production and decision-making.

ABSTRACT. With the rise of ‘movement parties’ (della Porta et al., 2017) or ‘hybrid parties’ (Flesher Fominaya, 2020) like Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece in the aftermath of the movements of the squares and the implementations of harsh austerity politics in the early 2010s, media and social movement scholars have turned their attention to the changing relationship between movements and political parties at the national level. However, one crucial aspect that remains curiously under-researched with few exceptions (notably Russell, 2019), is how movement parties emerged below and beyond the borders of nation-states.

Based on a four years-long engaged ethnographic research project with the transnational civil society organisation European Alternatives, this paper draws attention to the role of an emerging network of municipal movement parties in imagining a radically different Europe. I will discuss, in particular, the campaign From the Sea to the City, which works against ‘Fortress Europe’ and towards a progressive refugee politics through trans-municipal connections.

As the paper will show, digital media are essential to building and maintaining this network of municipal movement parties and social movement actors working towards European alternatives. At the same time, the research also points to how respective alternatives emerging from below and beyond the nation-state get lost in the nation-centredness of mainstream media. Yet, the paper concludes, researchers have much to gain from focussing on the role of municipalities, because more than re-inventing municipal government, the emerging network of movement parties has the potential to change policy at the transnational level.

ABSTRACT. This study starts from the media ecology and the Neo-Marxist urban spatial theory, and combines with the historical context of Hong Kong's colonial experience and the local resistance politics to analyze the resistance landscape of the Lennon Wall in the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) Movement. The study found that the Lennon Wall is not only in line with the tradition of seeking spatial justice in Hong Kong's local resistance politics, but also closely related to the awakening of Hong Kong's local consciousness. Lennon Wall is a form that people resists the injustice urban space by direct intervention, it symbolizing that the colonialist/neo-liberalist political-business alliances’ monopoly on Hong Kong's urban space has been broken, the relationship between the people and the urban space has been reversed, and the people have the right to construct the urban space, to define the urban space and to interpret the urban space, and they forming a community consciousness by participating in resistance ritual activities of Lennon Wall. The transnational characteristics of Lennon Wall and the mutualism characteristic of the resistance ritual activities also present an post-nationalist imagination of Hong Kong community, which distinct with the imagination of ethnicism community, then providing a new paradigm for community construction. This study argues that the Lennon Wall is a practice of radical democracy, and its emergence has bred a new Hong Kong subjectivity, which ends the colonialist culture based on the "economicism", and shapes a "public man" culture emphasizing local self-determination and political participation.

ABSTRACT. In 2017, Alyssa Milano’s tweet went viral after asking Twitter followers to share their experiences of sexual assault and harassment using the hashtag #MeToo. Whilst the #hashtag campaign’s awareness-raising success is compelling, there is also evidence of both active and passive silencing taking place. Thematic analysis of #MeToo tweets shared between October 2017 and November 2019 showed that although women’s voices were initially raised, there is evidence of symbolic annihilation of women and silencing of marginal groups, including Tarana Burke, the black, female campaign originator. Of particular concern is that this silencing was taking place on multiple levels from multiple sources, including those with personal, political, and business motivations. It was also carried out by individuals, political groups, and the social media platforms themselves. This research highlighted concerns that Twitter and other Social Media platforms are not inclusive spaces for minority voices. The voices we most need to hear are too often the ones that are silenced or absent. Social media platforms such as Twitter have the potential to empower marginalised groups, however the current online spaces seem to lead us further into our own echo chambers enmeshed in labyrinths of cul-de-sacs.

ABSTRACT. 'We Speak' (Documentary Film, 6 minutes, 2022) is an audio-visual conversation between filmmaker Sana Bilgrami, and composer and musician Niroshini Thambar, about the experience of claiming space in a post-colonial world. The film reflects on the possibilities and boundaries of being South Asian female creative practitioners in Scotland. Using personal archive, music, voice and glimpses of domestic and other spaces, the film challenges the stereotypes that are consciously or unconsciously implicit in a country that struggles to rid itself of the vestiges of colonialism.

Inspired by Trinh T Minh-ha's assertions about the impossibility of representation, the film adopts a deeply personal and reflexive methodological approach. There are no limits or particular shape to (self-)representation, and so the film can only be fragmented in its construction. We can speak with some certainty only about ourselves. The film is an accumulation of audio-visual fragments from the filmmakers' cultural and personal histories, interwoven with parts of a verbal conversation, to hint at the complexity of identity.

Sana Bilgrami was born in Pakistan and is a first-generation immigrant to the UK. Niroshini Thambar is a second-generation British Sri-Lankan, born in England. Both have made Scotland their home and have collaborated on projects in the past. This film is a practice-based response to RSE-funded research by Sana Bilgrami on the representation of South Asian women in Scottish cinema.

ABSTRACT. The emergence of social networking sites (SNS) has led to the rise of different virtual communities parallel to real-life social interaction spaces. This has offered particular opportunities for Bangladeshi women who might not be in a position to work outside the home otherwise. This study intends to explore the experience of Blogging and Vlogging of Bangladeshi women across the world who use digital space as a means of their development in terms of earning livelihood and freedom of expression. There is an emerging number of Bangladeshi women bloggers and especially vloggers who can communicate with Bangladeshi people around the world in their language, Bengali. This trend increased since Facebook has sanctioned monetization on video content in 2018. Since educational and technical expertise are not required to do this v/blogging apart from accessing the ability to internet and smartphone, women from across the society are making use of this opportunity to reach audiences and acquire followers at a global level. Virtual participation of Bangladeshi women is of perhaps greater significance because there are still constraints in women’s free movement. They often get suppressed by the patriarchal social value system and religious values. This study considers how Bangladeshi women become involved in these activities, their motivations and careers as well as how they deal with the adversities such as trolling. The research is based upon online in-depth interviews of 27 Bangladeshi women and the selected Facebook content analysis method carried out during 2020 and 2021.

ABSTRACT. This paper takes its inspiration from Alexander Dhoest’s (2015) call for more media scholars to self-reflect on their own media experiences and practices. Dhoest ‘argues that reflection on one’s own media use, as a researcher, may be useful as such, as a method to better understand the complexity and contextual nature of media uses and to indicate possible avenues for future research’ (2015:29). This is a sentiment I started to consider whilst undertaking my PhD, which examined the viewing practices of South Asian diasporic women in the northwest of England. The literature, I noticed rarely, if at all, talked about diasporic womens’ experiences of watching television, particularly soap operas (see Lad in Geraghty & Weissmann, 2016). Thus silencing the voices of a marginalised demographic audiences, unable to have their voices heard. Some literature, see Gillespie, 1995; Barker 1998 & 1998a, does focus more second generation audiences and their formulation of identity through television. In this presentation I will critically engage with my experiences of watching television; reflecting on my dislike for BBC Two’s broadcast of the Mahabharata (1989) on Saturday afternoons to looking forward to weekday afternoons with Philip Schofield and Andy Crane in the broom cupboard to calling everyone into the living room whenever someone vaguely who looked like me was on TV. Like Dhoest, I’ll attempt to inform my reflections through theory and research, some of which is mentioned above, as a way to start filling the gap in research having British South Asian womens’ voices heard.

ABSTRACT. This panel brings together five papers which examine the role of a local and community media in highlighting the voices of people marginalised by virtue of geography or identity. Taking inspiration from the conference theme of Silenced Voices, participants will draw on a variety of contexts across Europe, to examine the activities of those working beyond the mainstream media, the challenges they face and the impact of those activities on the identities of those excluded from dominant media practices. The papers focus on practitioners as well as audiences. This panel itself, therefore, brings increased focus to those working in the local and community media, who are often considered as an afterthought in media scholarship.

The presenters are a mix of established and early career researchers and include one practitioner who will talk on their own experience working, and for, older people. Together the papers cover a range of media platforms, from newspapers, to TV via community radio. As such they offer a fascinating insight into the variety of contemporary local and community media practice.

ABSTRACT. Social media platforms (SMPs) are an outlet for people of all backgrounds to express themselves and their experiences (Kerrigan and Hart, 2016; Alhabash and Ma, 2017). For poets, there is a scarce archive of research regarding their perspectives on their own digital presence. This study aims to understand the subjective experiences of 10 poets on SMPs, such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, in conjunction with their own representation of their identities. These poets are in locations such as North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom. As research on poets tends to focus more on poetry itself (Sherry and Schouten, 2002; Chan, 2003; Sanders, 2006; Berry and Goodwin, 2012; Lahman and Richard, 2014), SMPs have provided the opportunity for not only marketing capabilities (Margiotta, 2012), but for poets to speak out on numerous causes imperative to their identities. Within the data collected, several poets are influenced by their identities surrounding gender, sexuality, race, religion, location/environment, and more. Poets have discussed their hardships and activism through poetry related to these themes. These identities have influenced their presentation of online personae and how it seeps through their poetry. Additionally, SMPs provide the opportunity to explore and express those aspects of their personae within the online poetry community.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents findings from qualitative research into how fiction writers make a living in the UK, focusing on how a number of aspects of making a living from writing combine to silence writers as cultural workers.

There is a growing body of knowledge around what we might term media and cultural work, which highlights issues of precarity (Gill & Pratt, 2008) and structural inequality (Eikhof & Warhurst, 2013). This new research finds that writing is a precarious way to make a living and supports survey findings on low incomes (ALCS, 2018).

This paper argues that writers suffer from a lack of agency over career planning and are devalued by a publishing industry which produces them as voiceless and grateful providers of literary content for profit-making. In addition, writers’ own perceptions of writing as not-work, and the discourses of love, luck and magic they employ, function in complex ways to position them in enchanted spaces which, nevertheless, exclude the possibility of complaint (Dean & Greene, 2017). Writers as workers therefore lack both individual and collective voices.

This paper draws on ideas of passionate work (McRobbie, 2016) and, building on theories of hope in cultural work (Alacovska, 2018), presents a new concept of ‘maybeness’ as a quality of writing as work and a state-of-being occupied by insecure writers who cannot plan a progressive career path. In so doing, the paper explores how fiction writers, despite giving voice to others in their work, lack a voice as cultural workers.

ABSTRACT. This practice-based submission will reflect on the development of a current research project examining the adaptation of 'Cafflogion', a Welsh science fiction novel written by R. Gerallt Jones. Published in 1979, the novel presents the story of an encounter between Garth, a filmmaker from ‘The City’, and the inhabitants of Cafflogion, a distant and disregarded off-grid community which has, by pursuing a rigorous communitarian ethic, managed to independently sustain itself for about 30 years. They approach the filmmaker, asking him to portray their way of life on film for the benefit of the inhabitants of The City – resulting in a disastrous consequences. Our submission, which will mix screen presentation and live narration, in English and Welsh, will focus on the way in which the anti-authoritarian narrative of marginalisation reflected in the novel has been subverted in recent years by claims of ‘silencing’ and victimhood by reactionary (occasionally violent) self-narrating groups seeking to operate outside the bounds of civil society. The submission will reflect on ways in which using contemporary media might facilitate a reinstatement of the novel’s original ethic by emphasising its adaptation as an inter/active, ongoing process resulting in a hybrid of different outcomes: these include live durational physical performance, video installation work and interactive media forums, conducted jointly in Wales and New Zealand. It will also examine how the mediation of the adapted novel meets contemporary imperatives in terms of linguistic and cultural diversity (taking place in societies with significant native minority language communities) and carbon neutrality.

ABSTRACT. Censorship is best seen as an ingredient of authoritarian political cultures that varies depending on the system that produces it. In the State of Kuwait, the 2006 press law states that no prior censorship will be applied to print publications, but the law’s provisions have long been at odds with actual practice: publishers and self-publishing authors routinely submit copies of their books for pre-publication approval to the Censorship on Artistic Works Department of the Ministry of Information, even though they are not legally required to do so. The practices and customs of the ministry and the Kuwaiti publishing community have thus jointly created a customary law supporting censorship in the name of protecting the welfare of society from harmful ideas seen as a potential threat to the political, social, or moral order. The paper explores stories told by Kuwaiti authors about their encounters with the censorship department. Acquired through qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 15 traditionally and self-published Kuwaiti authors of poetry and fiction, the stories are treated as the authors’ means for expressing and negotiating their experiences. Read in the socio-political and cultural context of the Arabian Gulf, the stories are used to explore the meanings that authors ascribe to their lived experience of censorship.

ABSTRACT. Civil and political life are noisy affairs (or at least they should be). People compete to be heard and those that speak do so in all manners of ways. Indeed public discourse is better understood as the articulation of public sentiment and is a term that recognises that the ‘public’ simultaneously hold both rationally and irrationally, fair and prejudicial and calm and volatile views. The public when they express themselves do so over the gamut of good and bad arguments, open and closed outlooks, and generous and mean attitudes (Harrison 2019). Public sentiment is not a form of ideal speech, nor is it systematic and it can easily stray into hate speech and yet the civil power of the news is derived from its relationship to and on public sentiment and the way it listens and interprets myriad voices. Silencing such voices must be (but is not always) resisted. But how? One way is through the practical commitment of news journalism to the basic civil norms of reflexivity, tolerance and hospitality and through the ways in which news journalism can both expose and directly challenge those who would silence some or all of public sentiment. This requires that we see news journalism in terms of civil resistance, norm maintenance and norm building. This paper analyses the capacity of news journalism as a form of civil resistance in redressing the silencing of voices.

ABSTRACT. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become increasingly prevalent for organising, activism and critique. From the Arab Spring uprising to the most recent Movement dubbed #STOPLoaningKENYA, social media has become very vital.

Kenya is recognised internationally for digital innovation and media freedom is guaranteed in Kenya's 2010 Constitution (Articles 33, 34, and 35). However, in practice, the media is governed by a set of regulations muddled within various sections of civil and criminal law, which limit the freedom of critics and protestors.

Furthermore, the impact and influence of Kenya's legacy media have steadily declined over the last decade as social media has become a primary source of news and information for most Kenyans. With 100% dependency on advertisements, the media's commercial viability has decreased as advertisers are shifting their attention away from conventional local media. The government has since become the biggest single advertiser. With this dominance, the government threatens to withdraw its advertisements if a certain media house fails to report news in favour of government interests.

While the governments cannot completely control the media or shut it down as they need it for legitimacy and to publicise and enact their policies, they do have strategies to manage the power other actors have through the same media platforms, including bribery, leaking messages and shutdowns.

This paper reports on a series of interviews with political bloggers, independent activists, to understand the impact and implications of Kenya's Computer Misuse and Cybercrime Act (CMCA, 2018) on free speech in Kenya.

ABSTRACT. Ethnic minority media is fundamental to the way minority communities legitimise their existence, foster cross-cultural understanding, and raise awareness around racial injustices. However, while some countries have progressed in achieving these objectives, others have failed. Building off Delrio et al. (2010) “policies of invisibilisation”, this research makes a case for examining the role of state-led exclusionist policies in obstructing the development of ethnic minority media. Examining publications such as Race Today, in Brixton (UK) and Mandinga in Buenos Aires (Argentina) from the 1970s onwards, this research takes a historical analysis at the juxtaposition between media and public policy which guarantee freedom of speech and protection against media concentration on the one hand and the promotion of anti-immigrant and insidious racist policies that are suppressing ethnic minority media on the other. By employing an interdisciplinary framework that combines critical political economy of the media and cultural studies perspectives, the research begins to unpack how the discursive nature of media pluralism and diversity has been creatively engineered and overshadowed by dominant monoethnic interests.

ABSTRACT. Small charities and other non-profits often feel that they lack the resources and expertise necessary to create visibility and build support for their causes, which in turn exacerbates and perpetuates marginalisation of the most vulnerable and powerless in society. Digital activism, and research of this evolving phenomenon, has rapidly advanced in recent years. Contemporary high profile cases such as Darnella Frazier’s bystander video of the killing of George Floyd, Extinction Rebellion’s Digital Rebellion, the #MeToo and #EveryonesInvited sexual harassment movements, and the anti-vax phenomenon have demonstrated its power to focus public attention, mobilise global protests, stimulate policy debates, evidence legal actions and accelerate corporate restitutions, with negligible monetary expense. This paper will present new empirical research drawing on interviews with non-profit workers, volunteers, activists and other participants working in fields such as human and animal rights, mental health, poverty, addiction, homelessness and climate emergency, to analyse activist practices and their impacts. In so doing, the paper will explore the ways in which non-profit networks use social media and other digital technologies to communicate their cause, stimulate debate, build support and generate income in their attempts to drive urgent social, cultural, environmental, political and economic change, and reflect on the theoretical implications for nascent digital activism frameworks.

ABSTRACT. This practice-based submission focuses on the exploration of decolonised approach to collaborative filmmaking and the position Western researchers and filmmakers play in that. This multi-layered film investigates both the journey of indigenous filmmakers from misrepresented silenced voices to empowered agents of community filmmakers on the international arena, as well as the wider context of politics of representation and the fragile and contested role of non-indigenous collaborators. The film was recently shortlisted for the AHRC Research in Film Awards.

Film duration: 30 mins 39 seconds The link to the trailer: https://youtu.be/CAYah05Udxo

The film will be accompanied by a short introduction to the topic.

ABSTRACT. Media plays an ever-expanding role in the creation and dissemination of political narratives. But with most forms of media being tied up to hegemonic ideological structures of society, it is often those in positions of power who decide which stories can be told. In this presentation of my practice-based work, I will discuss the role of the documentary filmmaker in bringing silenced narratives to the fore and giving individuals affected by oppression and injustice a voice through media production. I will examine and analyse the processes of producing several of my films, especially the two feature documentaries “Even Though my Land is Burning” (2016) and “Not Just your Picture” (2020), both dealing with different aspects of the occupation of Palestine and individuals affected by it. I will apply theories of participatory media as well as anthropology and ethnography to discuss how such films can allow individuals silenced by hegemonic medial structures and discourses to bring their personal stories out and seek justice for their cause, but also what are the difficulties and challenges resulting from the inherent power imbalance between a filmmaker and their subjects, of which all media practitioners dealing with social issues must be aware.

The presentation would take the form of screening of film excerpts together with a discussion of the circumstances of their production and the “hidden knowledge” I gained from working on them, with focus on the collaboration with the protagonists. A full screening of “Not Just Your Picture” (58 Minutes) is also possible.

ABSTRACT. Assia Djebar’s film "The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua" is for me a perfect example of the subversive potential of cinematic language. In this video-essay I try to illustrate by alternating images from the movie with academic reflections the ways in which Assia Djebar utilises female gaze as a political tool to actively create a space for Algerian women and their stories in the construction of history. Lila, the main character who functions as an alter ego of Assia Djebar, is used to express the refusal of the Algerian women to be gazed at, in addition to her desire to speak and claim agency in the reconstruction of her own history. In addition to this Lila also gives expression to a sort of self-gaze of the filmmaker. This self-gaze allows Assia Djebar to question her own positionality as a filmmaker. Through Lilas conversations with old women of her native village, the film asserts female participation in Algerian history, but also celebrates a female oral tradition of history transmission. Lastly, by juxtaposing images of nature, archives of the war, agricultural practises, with female sounds, music and voice recordings, a heterogenous, subversive, cinematic environment is created free of colonial, oriental or patriarchal gaze.