ABSTRACT. This paper interrogates news and current affairs (NCAF) programming on Australian community radio to investigate how effectively the sector upholds and promotes the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia (CBAA) Codes of Practice.

For nearly 50 years, the Australian community radio sector has played a central role in the social movement of media democratisation. Community radio stations that engage in radical, alternative, and grassroots media production have been attributed as important cultural resources for the Australian community (Meadows et al 2009) and as social movement organisations promoting communicative democracy (Anderson 2017; Anderson et al 2020). However, not all stations can be viewed through a social movement framework. Diversification of the sector and a general lean to more conservative politics (possibly led by an increasing shift towards community radio being the only form of local media in many regional areas), alongside a drive towards commercialisation, hinder the sector’s capacity to act as an alternative media platform.

Through content analysis and interviews with NCAF practitioners, this paper focuses on CBAA Codes of Practice that cover Principles of Diversity and Independence; General Programming (to provide access to views not adequately represented by other broadcasting sectors); and Indigenous programming and coverage of Indigenous issues. These foundational principles and practices should ensure Australian community radio stations provide access and representation to the most silenced voices in Australian culture. This research aims to develop a stronger understanding of how well the sector is meeting this goal.

References on request to keep under word count

ABSTRACT. In the immediate aftermath of colonial rule, an overhaul of broadcasting policies was undertaken by the postcolonial Indian state. All India Radio (AIR) network was seen as a potent tool for producing a "cultured" citizenry in the newly formed nation-state. India inherited the colonial infrastructure of Radio and Telegraph, and the lawmakers of independent India saw radio as an important tool to be used not just for the dissemination of news and entertainment but to shape the national consciousness of a newly independent nation. In 1952 B V Keskar, the first Information and Broadcasting Minister of India, went so far as to unofficially ban popular film music on AIR stations to improve listeners' taste. In this paper, I am looking at how these broadcasting policies might lead us to look at the politics of producing an ideal citizen in the postcolonial space. Focusing on the radio in the period 1950-1970, I examine radio programming, popular discourse around the radio, and the listeners' resistance towards disciplining what they can listen to. I argue here that the policymakers in early postcolonial India saw radio as a "citizen machine" (McCarthy, 2010), and privileged class consciousness is implicit in this attempt to produce a cultured citizen. Examining how the policy infrastructure was intended to produce a space of national consciousness how it led to resistance from the radio listeners provide essential clues to politics of disciplining to communicative networks, cultural space, and the (re) imagining of the "Nation."

ABSTRACT. ‘Audience’ is a concept of the mass broadcast age: collective and public and live. ‘Listener’ has always co-existed, suggesting an intimate address to the individual, more appropriate for on-demand listening. Yet Alyn Euritt (2019) describes the strategies podcast producers use to create a sense of a live co-audience where no live broadcast exists. As new media technologies are adopted alongside existing ones, what changes can we see in how producers of content are imagining and coordinating their audiences? Based on interviews and programmes from 5 countries, this presentation examines the discourse of producers of audio news and documentaries who use immersive or 3D sound. In conventional audio, the listener is disembodied, all-hearing but never themselves perceived. In a 3D soundscene, events happen around them. This leads to ambitions for enhanced emotional engagement, attention and sense of adventure, but anxieties too over discomfort that can arise from eavesdropping or adopting an ‘unnatural’ position. These anxieties can lead producers of immersive audio to see certain techniques as ‘failed’ (Wincott, Martin and Richards 2021). What can these discourses of the immersive listener tell us about norms and expectations for journalism at this time? And might we instead be more bold in actively shaping how our listeners engage? For example can we foster either individual experiences or a sense of collective co-audience for different content? Could we use discomfort or the sense of being an intruder strategically, to make listeners consider their relationship to the people and stories they hear?

ABSTRACT. This paper is about listening to ‘erased and inaudible voices’ (Voegelin, 2020, p.114), and centres on three case studies from funded projects with UK veterans, migrants into and across Europe, and members of two small UK rural communities. The projects are connected firstly, by my involvement and secondly, by a method that I want to call ‘Listening Across’, which uses and adapts digital storytelling methodologies.

The first project, ‘Veterans Voices Gloucestershire’, was funded by Age UK Gloucestershire and involved 10 veterans co-producing recollections of life in the armed services: in Korea, Aden and in National Service. The second was an Erasmus+ project called ‘Mapping the Music of Migration’ that was about listening to stories about the self, prompted by song. A collection of these ‘song stories’ recorded in 7 European countries, was made publicly available through an interactive app. Previous research with NGOs across Europe had made it apparent there was little active work on talking about music as a method to open up spaces for listening. The third is a British Academy funded net zero project, where, as part of an interdisciplinary team, I am using adapted digital storytelling methods to listen to members of rural communities in Cumbria and Cornwall.

Drawing on scholarly perspectives on music and inheritance (Cohen, Grenier and Jennings 2022), and on listening (Bickford 1996, Back 2007, Gallagher 2017, LaBelle 2018, Western 2020), I reflect on the potential these projects have had to enable spaces and interfaces for a ‘listening across’ to previously silenced voices.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how emergent technological and aesthetic forms of documentary media practice are redefining the fields of human rights activism and investigatory journalism. I argue that these forms of practice are creating new ecologies of media practice and collaboration that are yet to be properly examined or theorised. A range of artists, researchers and media collectives (such as Forensic Architecture, SITU Research, Mnemonic, INDEX, VFRAME and the Digital Forensics Research Lab) are taking up these forms of media practice to transform the roles that the performative, ethico-aesthetic and technological play in the mediation of evidence and its capacity to intervene in humanitarian struggles. Moreover, within a political and cultural epoch marked by “post-truth” and “post-representation” discourses, these new visual and technological practices aim to reassert the role of non-fiction visual media forms to speak on behalf of often silenced and marginalised communities. Taking up Michael M. J. Fischer’s notion of the “ethical-political plateau”—those “strategic terrains on which multiple technologies interact [and] rework disciplinary authority structures”—I suggest that these generative networks of media collaboration are forcing us to reconsider how we visualise, critique and fight against instances of state and corporate violence and violations of human rights. Moreover, I argue that such a practice of “mediated forensics” is providing new methods of radical collaboration in the face of increasingly embedded and overarching regimes of control, surveillance and violence.

ABSTRACT. For America’s far right, cultural Marxism explains how a group of Jewish intellectuals seeded a clandestine coup of American cultural, civic and government institutions that has transformed the country into a dystopia, embarrassed by its past and ethnically white heritage.

A group of media active individuals tells us something similar is happening the in UK. They see themselves as critical outsiders defending the values of the Enlightenment against activist hate mobs, their apologists in academia, and elites and institutions who have been ‘infected’ by the ideology of wokeism. This community reinforces this message by locating its resistance within intellectual struggles against religious persecution and other forms of punitive elite orthodoxy in the past that are part of Britain’s national story. Subsequently, it constructs itself a counter-resistance movement; an ingroup (‘us’) who are patriotic, civil, enlightened, reasonable, evidence-led, imbued with common sense, shunned by their ‘woke’ peers, and concerned about plight the white working class as a disregarded ethnic group. Contrastingly, this community tells its audience that the outgroup, ‘the woke’, despises the white working class and British institutions and is elitist, abusive, irrational, anti-scientific, inversely racist, malign and unnecessarily divisive.

Using a combination of search data, a series of graphs and qualitative metrics to understand the data, we identify and visualise this community’s media outlets, political organisations, campaign groups, and think tanks. We therefore examine the war on woke’s community to make it legible to a broader audience, help readers understand its structure, dynamics, techniques, and its contradictions.

ABSTRACT. Though the term originated in the 1960s, it is only relatively recently that the concept of 'woke' became a staple of public discourse in Britain. Google Trends shows a steady increase in interest within the United States since 2014, but it is only since 2019 that there has been a surge in the United Kingdom. Often it is alluded to as exemplifying or being in opposition to British values and identity. Particularly where there appears to be a conflict between modernity and aspects of the nation’s colonial past, such as was evident in narratives around the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston. It also features during commentaries and exchanges relating to institutional power, censorship and minority rights/representation, including LGBT issues and the existence of cultural appropriation and/or structural racism, i.e., 'culture wars' discourses. Curiously, polling shows inconsistency in understanding and relating to the notion of being 'woke' and its implications. The current project aims to combine a critical discourse analysis of posts on a social media platform and coverage in mainstream UK press. We supplement these with a thematic analysis of a questionnaire issued to the public, asking them to personally define and exemplify what is it to be woke. Across these three data sets, we explore how 'wokeness' is conceptualised by the press and public to understand better the term's shared meaning and utility.

ABSTRACT. This paper will focus on Vietnamese cultural professionals’ experiences of using digital technologies in work and for digitizing art and culture online. The research has found that there are both opportunities and challenges in using digital technologies to reclaim previously silenced voices. While these communities of practice in the Global South may have the ability to influence public discourse, they face additional hurdles due to history, geography, and prejudice online. Digital technologies allow their voices to be heard and included, yet, these technologies also provide new types of hurdles and barriers, as with language bias, search engine optimisation (SEO), being considered as a periphery, and the presence of existing outdated narrative stereotypes that circulate about Vietnamese culture online. It is vitally important to understand these issues in order to prevent further digital inequalities and a continued silencing of their voices into the future.

This paper draws on findings from 50 interviews with cultural professionals working in Hanoi, Vietnam, in terms of what they need and what they aspire to achieve but, yet, reflect on how and why they are being held back and identifying challenges to having their voices heard. We will also shed light on the fact that it is not only the visible challenges that are holding them back, such as access to digital technologies, financial capacity and human resources, as it is also the more hidden, subtle, undercurrent of digital cultural colonialism that still persists online that is holding back digital inclusion.

ABSTRACT. The pandemic has exposed the importance of home as a concept for news and journalism research that until now has largely been hidden in plain sight. References to home in literature on digital journalism, for example, tend to confine the term as a descriptor of a digital news site’s ‘home page’ without extrapolating its full potential. In this paper we argue that home has particular salience for those studying local news and for examining the impact of disruption and the resettling of local news in digital space. While concepts of local, community and sense of place have been widely explored within this research patch, ‘home’ in all its complexity remains under-examined. Based on our review of multidisciplinary literature, we introduce four ‘homing beacons’: home sites – home as contained sites of media practices; hospitality – home as values and morality; territory – home as control and rules of space; comfort, routine – home as continuity and ritual. These beacons are designed to complement and extend existing scholarship on local journalism, highlight key issues, elicit theoretical thinking, and guide future research directions about local news in digital spaces and beyond.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates six professional roles (interventionist, watchdog, loyal-facilitator, service, infotainment, civic) the journalists perform in the media system of an Arab country, Kuwait, across four media platforms (TV, Radio, Press, Online). The rationale of this research is supported with evidence observed in the analysis of JRP literature which highlight several key arguments. One significant argument this paper addresses is an existing gap between two main concepts of JRP, role conception and role performance (Mellado et al. 2017; Mellado 2015). Another key argument emphasises on the importance of studying non-Western journalistic cultures outside of the Western advanced democratic societies context (Mellado et al. 2017; Hanitzsch et al. 2011; Gunaratna 2010). As a result, the research identified three research questions: RQ1) What are the main journalistic roles that materialise in Kuwaiti news content? RQ2) Is there a gap between role conception and role enactment? and RQ3) What explains the nature of the presence of certain journalistic roles in Kuwaiti media? This paper pursues a mixed methodological approach of content analysis (1868 news articles) collected from multiple media outlets across the four platforms, surveys from 55 journalists whom news articles were analysed in the content analysis, and interviews with 15-20 journalists who undertook the surveys. This framework has conceptual and theoretical implications through answers to what roles prevail (RQ1), the presence of a gap (RQ2), what explains the nature of any gap and why certain roles prevail (RQ3).

ABSTRACT. We live in an interconnected world that has transformed into a ‘single place’ (Robertson, 1992: 6). Despite this global interconnectedness, we need international correspondents, those ‘key players in today’s globalisation of consciousness’ (Hannerz, 2002: 65), to provide us with representations of distant places, people and events which we would not be able to see, hear and experience ourselves.

In the public discourse, the one-dimensional understanding (Hamilton, 2009: 5) of the heroic and intrepid correspondent is prevalent (Murrell, 2010: 127). While correspondent’s perspectives, in addition, dominate research (Palmer and Fontan, 2007), other actors of global news production – the so-called ‘fixers’ (locally-based media workers) – have been hidden in the shadows (Palmer, 2019: 2), notwithstanding they are vital ‘linguistic and cultural translators’ (Brooten and Verbruggen, 2017: 445).

The correspondent-fixer relationship is both profoundly hierarchical and unequal, favouring the correspondent (Bunce, 2010; Seo, 2016) and simultaneously deeply collaborative (Palmer, 2019: 6). Nevertheless, this power can be in flux, as locally-based media workers possess ‘innate power’ due to their skills (Murrell, 2013), upon which the international correspondents depend on ‘to do the job’ (Palmer, 2019: 18).

To date, there is a lacuna in examining both the relationship and power dynamics between international correspondents and locally-based media workers, although this ‘lack of transparency […] can influence audience understandings’ (Brooten and Verbruggen, 2017: 452). This literature-based research-in-progress paper will try to shed light on those silent voices in the global news production process that have – to date – mainly remained in the shadows.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the extent and impact of self-censorship within the UK sports media. The data, based on 10 in-depthinterviews with sports journalists and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, indicates the prevalence and diverse reasons for self-censorship within the industry. The data highlights how social media has brought about forms of self-censorship which have far-reaching consequences for the flow of accurate information and honestly-held opinion. Judicious self-censoring occurs in order for a journalist to bolster their journalistic capital on social media – a capital whose size can be measured in follower numbers. The paper provides an 11-part taxonomy of reasons for self-censorship. Among the reasons are: a desire to retain a relationship with a sportsperson or preserving contacts more broadly; a fear of getting facts wrong and then being criticised on social media; fear of defamation/legal action; wariness of voicing the ‘wrong’ view or story angle on social media and receiving a hostile reaction, or fear of one’s words or opinion being ‘twisted’ on social media; and a broader desire to benefit one’s own standing as a journalist on social media. The complexity of the web of reasons for self-censorship that are connected to social media usage is explored. The paper finds that self-censorship in sports journalism is a phenomenon that has been intensified by the advent and evolution of social media.

ABSTRACT. This paper draws on data from an ongoing project which historicises and contextualises contemporary anti-vaccination movements. The work looks at the ways in which historical opposition to vaccines in the UK has been filtered through the media. Drawing on archival data from UK national newspapers and broadcasts, I uncover the ways that those opposed to vaccination attempted to access the mainstream, and further, the ways in which they themselves were depicted. The project is comparative in focus and uses reportage and press engagement with respect to two cases, polio myelitis and diphtheria in the mid-twentieth century. The work fits well into the theme of the conference as it illustrates the ways in which marginalisation can point the way to greater radicalisation and the emergence of more widely oppositional discourse. I here look in particular at the intersection between concepts of freedom of speech / action and bodily autonomy and ideas around the responsibility of the citizen and argue that the creation of a ‘public’ for anti-vaccination narratives is as much an effect of suppression as of mutual interest.

ABSTRACT. I propose to present insights from my year-long NWO supported research project which starts in May 2022. Using my institution, The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, to anchor the practice of exposing ethical injustices and repairing relationships with formerly excluded groups, my research investigates the following overarching question:

How can we ensure that the tools to rewind and record history are accessible to all people, while at the same time preserving and sharing these stories in a trustworthy way as part of the national media heritage narrative?

Furthermore, how can we, as a national institution, recognise and counter the omission, trivialisation and condemnation of under represented communities and assure they feel welcome to enter and contribute to a national collection?

The focus will be specifically on working with the LGBTQ+ community, which has been particularly susceptible to erasure in the media and in museum and archival practises. Focusing on this community will also be a best practice example of direct representation, as I bring my own lived experience to the work.

With this research, I aim to provide the conceptual underpinnings and ethical approaches for a theory of change around community engagement with audiovisual heritage. This will in turn lead to a community hub in physical form within Sound and Vision, by reappropriating an existing space in the public arena of the building. The theory of change will outline the interventions necessary to ensure a collaborative, trustworthy and sustainable relationship with the community.

ABSTRACT. The dominant discourse surrounding the legacy local newspaper is one of decline in number and quality, coupled with anxiety about that decline on the continued ability of titles to represent communities. This discourse overwhelmingly blames the disruption posed by digital technology for the relentless cost cutting that has impacted how, where and when newspapers are produced and circulated. In the extreme, titles are closed leaving ‘news deserts’ (Abernathy, 2018). The consequence is a degraded ‘fourth estate’ which no longer represents those it would claim to serve.

This paper draws on evidence gathered via oral history interviews with local newspaper workers in England to demonstrate instead that this strategy of rationalisation can be traced back to the second half 20th century. It focusses on one consequence – the removal of quality control processes from newspaper production. The interviews cover five decades from the 1950s to the 2000s; this epoch coincides with the shift to centralised ownership of local newspapers in the UK by corporations, resulting in titles which were ‘local in name only’ (Franklin and Murphy, 1992). By enabling the capture of personal memory of what might be considered the mundane detail of working life, oral history enriches the data available to those who study the local newspaper and links the contemporary decline to a corporate business strategy spanning 70 years. This lends evidence to the thesis that roots of the current ‘crisis’ pre-date the digital challenge to an advertising-led business model (Matthews, 2017; Pickard, 2019).

ABSTRACT. In August 2022, Amazon Prime Video released A League of Their Own, a brand-new adaptation of the 1992 film of the same name. The programme joins a host of series that explore questions of gender, sex, race, and class in different eras while employing the style, aesthetics, and genre conventions of our current age of television, such as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Prime Video, 2017—), Stranger Things (Netflix, 2016—) and Ratched (Netflix, 2020—). As the 2022 serial version of A League of Their Own is framed by critics as a portrayal of “a whole different crop of Peaches” that “doesn’t shy away from exploring the racism that was rampant in 1940s America, as well as the reality that a lot of these women who grew up honing their pitching arms instead of their baking skills were very, very queer” (The AV Club, 2022), questions about how exactly the voices of these women are brought to the fore in this adaptation are worth exploring. This paper is particularly interested in how resilience, resistance, and confidence are articulated in the series as contemporary cultural imperatives in a nostalgic setting, and thus will shed light on how current negotiations and articulations of resilience, resistance, and confidence are shaping and shaped by the specificities of the medium of television.

ABSTRACT. In 2018, Tanya Serisier argued in Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Narrative Politics that 'feminist anti-rape politics is founded on the belief that producing and disseminating a genre of personal experiential narratives can end sexual violence' (p. 4). Publicly 'speaking out' has, typically, been viewed as a way through which the previously silenced voices of victim-survivors of men's violence against women might be heard. In the years that have followed Serisier's intervention, with the continuing media attention on movements like #MeToo, the concept of speaking out has maintained a privileged position in public discourse about men's violence against women. This panel will explore media representations of, and engagements with, sexual violence and domestic abuse that are, often, narratives about speaking out. Despite frequent characterisations as such, speaking out is not an uncomplicatedly feminist activity.   

This panel will examine the contemporary role speaking out plays across several mediums: on film and television, in visual and news media, and through direct engagement with victim-survivors. It seeks to interrogate the role of survivor speech in various media, considering how it has been employed both in service of, and in opposition to, feminist politics. The papers also seek to examine the material role speaking out has played in the lives of victim-survivors, and considers how speaking out has, or has not, practically served them.

ABSTRACT. This panel brings together researchers from the newly formed MeCCSA Sound Studies Network. It is themed around the political and ethical dimensions of the creative use of music and the human voice in film and sound art. The panel will explore theoretical analyses of existing audiovisual media, and discussion of original creative practice. Both the potential exclusion and active inclusion of marginalised, alternative and traumatised ‘voices’, unites the papers, with race a key thread. Andy Birtwistle and Nessa Johnston examine respectively how the voices of black American musicians are ‘silenced’ in narrative film through being denied speaking roles as jazz performers (Altman’s Kansas City), or de-emphasising their authorship of blues and soul music, performed on screen by white Irish performers (Parker’s The Commitments). By contrast, Linda O’Keefe and Geoffrey Cox describe how their respective creative collaborations, in the form of a sound installation commemorating the Holocaust, and commissioned ‘video poems’ filmed in the countryside, seek to actively give voice to people of colour and survivors of war and genocide. They will explore how as creative artists, they negotiate the ethics of combining the sonically aesthetically pleasing with overt or sub-textual political issues. Together, the four panellists use sound studies of media to consider the ethics of sonic representation.

ABSTRACT. This paper discusses my work as a practice researcher in experimental documentary film, which traces the boundaries of co-creation and the sensory expression of traumatic memory.

Practice research is concerned with the tensions of revealing ‘often unrecognised ways of knowing that emerge in practice’ embracing sensory, embodied, tacit and affective expressions of knowledge (Bulley & Özden, 2021: 1-5). This includes the silence and unrepresentability inherent to the aftermath of a traumatic event (Rutherford, 2013: 82). But what does it mean when this silenced body belongs simultaneously to the filmmaker and researcher?

Following the journey of the experimental short 'what it felt like to dream fire', which I co-created with sound designer Bryant Bayhan, I present a set of reflections on the creative process of exploring silenced knowledge embodied in the filmmaker/researcher. Borrowing from Jill Bennett (2005) and Laura U. Marks (2000), I will discuss the film as an affective encounter of my identities as filmmaker, researcher and spectator as well as the problem this poses for understandings of agency. I argue that an experimental documentary practice that employs haptic visuality as a creative device can construct a communicable language for these identities to meet. Importantly, I propose a way of thinking about this encounter that works with the uncertain fluidity inherent to trauma rather than looking for narrative representation. I, then, argue that this creative process reveals the tensions of exploring embodied silence as a practice researcher, but also a new epistemology of communicating political agency.

ABSTRACT. This project is a collaboration between two filmmakers, Carla Ambrósio Garcia, who has lived mostly in Portugal and the UK, and Dany Seif, who has lived mostly in Egypt. They met at work in Egypt, where they both currently reside and teach film at a British university.

Upon her encounter with the (fascinating) pyramids of Giza, Carla’s first idea for a film was to photograph the pyramids in 16mm analogue film, in time-lapse, over several cycles of day and night. Analogue film is still the most reliable moving image archive material, but how does it compare to the longevity of the pyramids? The film would comment on ephemerality and loss in capturing a moment in the existence of the pyramids, as they seem capable of outlasting any present and future forms of cinema.

Nevertheless, this imagined film by a European outsider who comes to Egypt could be seen to repeat a gesture with colonial overtones, to cast a gaze that is prey to the fascinations and misconceptions characteristic of Orientalist discourse (Said, 1978). What would my Egyptian colleague Dany think of making a film of the pyramids, or set in the pyramids?

Thus, the pyramids of Giza became only a starting point open to challenge in a collaborative film project that has as its foundation a cross-cultural dialogue. This dialogue aims to uncover differing and overlapping viewpoints of what a film of Egypt or set in Egypt could be, and to question preconceived notions of representation, place, identity and culture.

ABSTRACT. SATELLITE DREAMING REVISITED is a new website that describes and analyses the last four decades of Australian Indigenous media, work which offers a unique and powerful case study of a community struggling to represent itself in electronic media.

Satellite Dreaming was a TV programme – broadcast in Australia and in the UK in the early 1990s – which traced the emergence of Australian Indigenous electronic media at the time. It is still seen as ‘a film of considerable historic importance’ (SBS/NITV) and a ‘a useful teaching resource on the history of Indigenous media, and how it differs from mainstream programming’ (Australia's National Film and Sound Archive).

SATELLITE DREAMING REVISITED uses a chapterised version of the 1991 programme as the focus for exploring Indigenous media work in Australia over the last four decades – the 1980s to now – through interviews with many of the people involved in the original programme, and in the wider field – some of whom have also written essays for the Site. The Sources section contains over 100 pages of information about relevant films, books, documents and organisations, as well as the interviews.

In this presentation I will show and talk about the development and production of the website. I will use material from the site itself to discuss some of the arguments about indigenous and resistant media that emerge from it, and indicate some of the uses that the site can be put to in HE contexts.

ABSTRACT. Menstrual activism has long aimed to break the silence around menstruation, tackle social inequalities, and educate people about topics such as menstrual health and sustainability. In March 2020, due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, face-to-face activities came to a halt and activists had to quickly rethink how to achieve their objectives through digital means. With a view to understanding how menstrual activism in Great Britain has been shaped by the global pandemic, this paper presents findings from 32 interviews with menstrual advocates that were conducted between May 2020 and January 2021. Drawing on critical menstruation studies and scholarship about digital feminist activism, the thematic analysis of these interviews reveals the obstacles and opportunities that arose because of the pandemic, the knowledge that activists gained, and how the pandemic influenced their objectives and strategies. Although activists improved their online engagement, this only helped them to raise awareness amongst privileged people. I argue that, by shedding light on the limitations of digital methods in connecting with minority communities, the pandemic highlighted the elitist and exclusive nature of digital activism. My intersectional approach challenges normative discourses within contemporary feminist scholarship that position digital feminist activism as inclusive. This paper therefore urges feminist scholars to reconsider the limitations of the digital space and reconsider the value of physical spaces and offline activism.

ABSTRACT. Cathy Greenhalgh, Independent Researcher.

Vigarello claims ‘the history of fat people is the history of a condemnation and its transformations across differing cultural contexts and socially targeted rejects’ and that ‘difficulties experienced by the obese person…and their psychological suffering’ are often not accounted for (2013), Over years of ethnographic work with cinematographers, making films and academia, I have periodically returned to the subject of obesity, plus-size, fat, call it what you will - as no term suffices. I have published articles, performed, made a film, conducted psycho-geography and most recently undertaken collaborative and participatory ethnographic fieldwork and made analogue collages / photomontage. All these forays attempt to describe lived experience, cultural and material perspectives, avoiding the pressing media and film focus on obesity as epidemic or spectacle. This subject is personal, and to some extent it affects my work with a particular attitude to a praxis which tries to be diasporic, inclusive and inter-disciplinary. In this paper I will draw on Mieke Bal’s notion of ‘migratory aesthetics’ (2009) and an inter-sectionality inclusive of size, with an expanded poetics of the ‘undercommons’ (Stefano and Moten, 2013, 2021). I contend that the lived experiences of big people contain radical force which undermines societal ‘norms’, instead of the usually exoticised, marginalised, silenced or stigmatised representatons in mainstream media and film. I will present the paper as a visual anthropology using my own works and media images collected over the last forty years.

ABSTRACT. Cosmetic surgery is a popular practice in Thailand, especially among women. Yet, the cosmetic surgery experiences of young Thai women have been under-researched within the field of gender. Aiming to illuminate their voices that deserve more attention, this conference presentation examines: what are the motivations of these Thai women to undergo cosmetic surgery? This is investigated through the lens of intersectionality which, in this context, refers to interwoven connections between different social characteristics, particularly class, ethnicity, and gender. The methodology involves qualitative online interviews with Thai women in their 20s and 30s. Based on the research data, this presentation tentatively argues that, regardless of class, the cosmetic surgery experiences of young Thai women have largely resulted from not just gendered beauty norms and high beauty demands in Thailand, but also media (especially cosmetic surgery networks on social media and visual culture on social media) and their self-confidence/satisfaction. By gendered beauty norms, the conference presentation refers to both women’s self-monitoring and inspiration or surveillance from other women, as opposed to direct pressure from men. Furthermore, race and ethnicity are at play: not only white aesthetic standards but also Thai and Korean popular culture impact upon their decision-making on these experiences. In this respect, this presentation helps decolonise feminist scholarship. Conclusively, this presentation highlights how gender, media, race, and ethnicity influence the decision-making of young Thai women on undergoing cosmetic surgery in the way that increases their self-empowerment without directly surrendering to men and white beauty standards.

ABSTRACT. Digital media have enabled people with disabilities (PWDs) to connect with each other. However, empirical research on how PWDs use digital media to develop and maintain social relationships offline is scarce and found to be online and escapist. The paper proposes the analytical lens of social access to examine how the role of digital media in PWDs’ social relations is shaped by (i) affordances of digital media, (ii) mixedness of relations, and (iii) interaction of online and offline worlds. An ethnographic study was conducted in a school for young people with mainly physical disabilities on how they used digital media to create and maintain social relations, following some students to mainstream colleges. In this study, the young PWDs’ social and policy context was shaped by education and the debate of whether young PWDs should be educated in separate schools or integrated into mainstream education.This study illustrates that digital media use interweaves with these educational policies and their problems. First, the visual profiles and endorsements on social media platforms fomented both social exclusion and inclusion online and offline with intersectional and intra-disability differences. Second, social media messaging apps and games afforded the copresence of PWDs in rewarding virtual spaces when confronted with hostile or unrewarding school environments, typically not changing the latter. Social access underlines the importance of studying how digital media interweave with offline social relations and inequalities, rarely altering but sometimes augmenting and ameliorating them.

ABSTRACT. As one of the most unequal societies in the world, South Africa offers a unique vantage point to explore a diverse range of perspectives on the challenges and opportunities offered by digital inclusion to members of marginalised groups. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, during the past two years, South Africa implemented stringent lockdown measures entailing social isolation and a shift to emergency remote communication through digital technology. At the time of writing, increased vaccination rates, the spread of less severe variants and the implementation of vaccine mandates strengthen the prospect of a return to “normal”, almost universally regarded as necessary and indeed desirable. However, within (dis)ability studies, the concept of normality has long been the object of critical inquiry. In this paper, I problematise ableist constructions of normality by analysing online texts (journal articles, social media posts and comments) by and about people with disabilities. I focus particularly on personal narratives and accounts highlighting advantages, positive aspects and improved wellbeing or productivity as a result of remote work, study and social interactions. Foregrounding the voice of those directly affected, consistent with an experiential model of disability, reveals possible concerns, anxieties or even resistance to the return to the pre-pandemic world auspicated by many. It should also be noted that, far from a simple turning back of the clock, in many cases, the new normal would still carry a legacy of social distancing, mask-wearing, sanitising, restrictions and regulations which have a direct impact on people with specific disabilities.

ABSTRACT. Whilst there exists a burgeoning field of research on Paralympic media coverage, to date there have been very few studies focusing on Paralympians’ self-representation on social media. In our AHRC project, we draw on the scholarship of feminist media studies and critical disability studies to develop a feminist account of Paralympians’ self-representation on Instagram. Through a visual media analysis of images posted around the Paralympic Games in Tokyo, we observed that female Paralympians are particularly active in creating content. While these self-representations can be subversive and progressive, they often remain part of a normative project of playing the visibility game. We explain the usefulness of the term ‘hyper-countering’ for understanding in what ways some stereotypes are countered by simultaneously reproducing other stereotypes. . We found that Paralympians’ content creation should be understood as a gendered and neoliberal practice, embedded in meritocratic narratives, a digital postfeminist culture and may serve such ‘ideals’ as whiteness, able-nationalism and homonationalism. The concern to this practice is that, in this (visual) discourse, social acceptance relies heavily on reproducing a hierarchy of disability according to attractiveness and marketability. What does this rebranding of disability mean for the subversive and emancipatory potential of such imagery?

ABSTRACT. Last year, the number of people with disabilities rose to 1.2 million representing 11.2% of the Jordanian population. In Jordan, there is a societal hold surrounding disability, and people are often ashamed of talking about this “haram” subject. Persons with disabilities confront social and cultural barriers due to lack of education, awareness and inclusion.

Traditional media has long avoided the subject of disability stating that disability is not a “priority” when publishing articles in the media and on Facebook. When publishing disability content on Facebook, the Jordanian media focuses on what brings the most engagement which, to my surprise as a visually impaired researcher, is not the case for stories about disability. Most coverage on disability in Jordan tends to focus on individual stories and when featured by the media they portray people with disabilities by invoking pity, sadness and sometimes through an inhumane lens. These representations fall under different models identified by disability studies literature, such as the Social Model of Disability and the Medical Model of Disability.

When focusing on portrayals of persons with disabilities in traditional Jordanian media, journalists often focus on portrayals rooted to stereotypes, portraying people with disabilities as “heroes that have overcome adversity” or “victims that need saving” as quoted by most media experts that I interviewed. From my preliminary findings which I will discuss in my paper, I discovered that some people with disabilities shy away from media coverage as journalists focus on reporting about their disability and not their achievements or challenges.

ABSTRACT. Recognising the #MeToo movement as a contextual backdrop, this paper questions how contemporary music fans adopt strategies to reconcile (or not) with a beloved artist in the wake of allegation(s) of sexual misconduct or gendered abuse. Speaking with 57 fans of various hip-hop and indie-rock/alternative case study artists, it seeks to consider how gender, genre, celebrity status and emotional resonance guide the narratives of respectability politics, ‘good’ victimhood’ and perpetrator accountability that occur in online fan discussion and reaction, shaped by normative understandings of race, misogyny and masculinity that occur within contrasting musical scene discussion. While hip-hop/rap is traditionally perceived as a sexually aggressive black ‘alpha male’ domain (Rose, 1994; Ogbar, 2007; Weitzer & Kubrin, 2009; Vito, 2019), indie-rock/emo is normatively considered a ‘safe’ space for the intellectual white ‘beta’ or ‘nice guy’-male, chauvinist in potentially less obvious ways (Fonarow, 2006; de Boise, 2014; Kennedy, 2012).

Through inviting participants to reflect on their online postings as well as their personal morality processes, the paper explores the viability of separating art from the artist, the pressures of ‘performing’ a moral identity online, and the extent to which individual fan forgiveness, ‘cancellation’ and/or justification is influenced by an increasingly-polarised social media discourse surrounding #MeToo and sociopolitical activism. In drawing on timely scholarship as well as her empirical research, the author seeks to explore the intricacies of emotional labour and consumer guilt that place fans in a position of complex moral dilemma within a ‘cancel culture’ climate.

ABSTRACT. Electronic dance music (EDM) has influenced youth counter culture movements and given disenfranchised communities a safe and empowered place to meet, play and dance for over four decades.

Born in the late 1980s as an underground club music scene called Chicago House, through to the 'Super Club' mainstream surge of the 1990s and 2000s – EDM's popularity as a genre within nightclubs such as Cream (Liverpool, UK), Pacha (Ibiza) and Ministry of Sound (London, UK) helped grow EDM into a multi-million dollar entertainment industry.

This industry continued to grow to greater dominance within 2010s festival culture, sound tracking events such as Tomorrow land (Belgium) and hosting superstar DJs such as Tiesto, as resident DJs in Las Vegas.

What started as an underground counterculture movement is now in the 2020s a Billion dollar industry of club nights, brands and influencers.

But in March 2020 - as the Covid-19 Global pandemic forced a global lockdown, EDM and its global community were silenced.

This paper explores via a netnography methodology how virtual reality technology (VR) and the virtual reality platform VRchat created a safe, diverse and virtual way for a variety of youth global counterculture communities to continue to listen, dance and freely express themselves inside a VR based EDM scene.

The Goal of this paper is to explore how this might affect how Generation Z participants in the VR rave scene might consume popular music in the future and to better understand how this might change the Music Industry beyond 2022.

ABSTRACT. Urban music continues to be excluded from school curricula, favouring musical practices and aesthetics that speak to a well-educated and affluent parental home and confirm a particular historical-aesthetic approach. Equally, most research on music consumption in families and peer groups focuses on adolescents and young adults from stable homes who are often afforded musical training and who are socialised and enculturated from early on through immersion in parental practices.

Such approach ignores young people from marginalised backgrounds whose experience of a home might differ. In this context, it is important to (re)consider the consumption of urban music with regard to the role it plays for young people. Moving away from discourses of subculture, resistance and youthful rebellion, I argue that urban music is important for young people to build social cohesion in their peer groups, thus facilitating a sense of belonging. This paper presents findings from a research project with young people from marginalised backgrounds and their consumption and production of urban music.

It is suggested that joint music listening experiences are crucial for in-group cohesion, negotiating personal identities at micro level and cultural values at macro level. The notion of home is explored, and it will be suggested that the inclusion of urban music into the school curriculum provides an opportunity for young people from marginalised backgrounds to establish a stronger relationship with peers outside their social circle with with school.

ABSTRACT. The climate crisis has come to define this generation of activists (Hestres & Hopke, 2017), who are fighting for better awareness and policies to face this global challenge. The FridaysForFuture (FFF) movement, especially, is composed of young activists who resort to their moral authority as children (Marris 2019) to demand adults take responsibility for jeopardizing their future (Wahlström et al., 2019), thus anchoring FFF activism in the generational, self-identification processes implied by being young (Della Porta 2019). By reviewing literature on youth activism (Bishop, 2015; Gordon, 2009; Liou & Literat, 2020; O’Brien et al., 2018) and digital activism (Bennett & Segerberg, 2011; Hopke & Hestres, 2018; Toret et al., 2015; Trerè, 2019), and analyzing thematically (Guest et al., 2011) twenty semi-structured interviews to FFF-Rome activists, this contribution explores how FFF-Rome activists challenge adults’ patronizing attitudes by speaking up about the climate crisis on their own channels (social media) and in their own way (expressing the needs of their generation). It highlights how FFF activists resist the ageism that judges them unfit for political participation and resort to online and offline activism to fight against climate change. It focuses on the connection between youth activism and generational identity and analyzes young climate activists’ struggle to be heard and taken seriously by adults (Kligler-Vilenchik & Literat, 2019) as they fight against and strategically embrace paternalistic aptitudes to achieve their goals.

ABSTRACT. Climate change is finally gaining greater visibility in television representations of the natural world, but most of these representations are didactic in nature, pointing to a continued paternalistic approach of engaging audiences in climate action. Considering continued criticisms of public service television as being paternalistic (e.g. Ytreberg, 2002) and the real threats to public service television under the current British government, it is vital that alternative models of engaging the public in political action are found. In this paper, we report the outcomes of a British Academy funded project that examines if local television, if it was redefined as a public rather than a commercial service, could support local responses to climate change by observing and disseminating the processes of community decision making via local climate assemblies. We will show clips of our programmes – a documentary series about the assemblies and a life-style television programme – and discuss the findings from our audience research into a local community in Wavertree, Liverpool. We will show that television’s role in communicating responses to climate change could be reorganised to a greater engagement of local communities and audiences if – and only if – political decision-making processes themselves were changed towards a greater inclusion of local activism.

ABSTRACT. The climate justice movement demands a recognition of humanity´s responsibility on the impacts of global climate change on poor and vulnerable people. Research has shown strong links between severe food insecurity and disasters, including droughts and floods, and people living in food insecurity are heavily impacted. Media discourses influence our understanding of climate change and climate justice, and shape societies’ responses and actions. Research on media and climate justice remains scarce and has mainly concentrated in examining the Global North. This project is the first attempt to examine how climate justice is represented in a Latin American country. The aim is to identify the discourses around climate justice, specifically in relation to food security, and how international, national and subnational actors are portrayed, the prominence given to the topic, the specific concerns, and who has the power to influence discourse. Given the differential impacts of climate change on food security in the global North and South, this research compares the characteristics of the media discourses in Mexico and in the UK, before, during and after the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit and UN Climate Change COP26. The research will inform practitioners working on climate justice and food security (including journalists, activists, governments, and international and national civil society organizations) about how representation of climate justice influences society´s engagement with it and to what extent the climate justice movement has an impact on the public sphere. The results will also contribute to wider academic debates on media, power and justice.

ABSTRACT. Those who are affected most by climate change are the least responsible for it. From the Sami herders of Finland to the Gamo farmers in the highlands of Ethiopia, these groups are designated by the UN, international organizations, and global media as the world’s “most vulnerable” or the “world’s poor”. The impact of climate change for these communities has devastated their livelihoods and put them at risk of losing traditions and cultures that have been in existence for centuries. Yet, the voices privileged in global media coverage about the impact of climate change are not representative of indigenous and minority groups who are affected the most. This study examines the climate change issue through an analysis of scientific experts, global celebrities, indigenous groups, and activists used as sources in the media coverage. By analysing these individuals/groups, the research aims to explore whose voices are valued and have social capital in climate change discourses. The research also seeks to examine which voices impact policy on the ground. Data gathered through a content analysis of selected English medium newspapers will increase our understanding of how power/social capital, media access/representations and individual attributes are factors that influence voices in climate change media discourses.

ABSTRACT. Past research suggests that news media employ feminised issue-area and character trait stereotypes when covering female candidates, often to their electoral detriment. Moreover, women candidates’ self-presentation strategies are also shown to be affected by these gendered framings. These conclusions are primarily drawn from studies focusing on mainstream parties’ and their candidates’ news coverage, with little attention paid to female candidates of smaller parties. Yet, media coverage is not only crucial for smaller parties and candidates, but their less-traditional issue platforms and electoral strategies may invite alternative news framings. This paper aims to address this gap by investigating the use of gender stereotypes in the news coverage of feminist parties and candidates. The platforms of feminist parties often explicitly challenge gender stereotyping and discrimination, thus offering a unique site for exploring gendered mediation. I employ a mixed-method analysis of the newspaper coverage of five European feminist parties and their candidates during the 2019 European Parliament elections and preceding local elections campaign periods within each country. Automated dictionary-based content analysis maps the presence of traditional feminised issue and trait stereotypes and interpretive analysis of a subset of articles adds nuanced understanding of the type and variation of gendered stereotypes employed.

ABSTRACT. This paper discusses how, why, and with what perceived consequences British political journalists negotiate professional journalism boundaries with social media logic, with a focus on tweeting about Brexit. The data to inform the discussion is derived from a multimethod approach combining digital methods, content analysis, interviews, and digital ethnography. The findings are contextualised by drawing on theories of boundary work and emotional labour. They suggest that British journalists are reluctant to redefine many of the traditional journalism boundaries on social media, particularly when it comes to contentious political topics. Specifically, journalists primarily tweet in a professional capacity, focusing on factual and transparent reporting. Importantly, these ‘traditionalists’ report a range of motivations for continuing to observe existing boundaries, such as role conception, employer considerations, but also audience reactions, and the need to manage their emotional labour when doing work on Twitter. That said, there is a group of journalists willing to negotiate, and perhaps transform, some boundaries. However, it appears there is yet a consensus to be achieved among journalists about whether the boundaries of journalism should be expanded with new practices and behaviours, such as sharing personal information and/or opinions, and in particular when it comes to tweeting about contentious topics, such as Brexit.

ABSTRACT. Greater awareness to children and young adults has been gradually developing in a reaction to „a changing position of children and their agency in the modern world" (UN’s General comment No. 25 (2021) on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment). Empowerment of children has entered a new phase with the advent of digital media: the online environment has “afforded children with crucial opportunities for their voices to be heard” and “has helped to realize children’s participation at the local, national and international levels” (ibid.). The social context of online media, however, has paradoxical impact on children’s social agency. Within the Czech online public sphere, public engagement of minors, both offline and online, has triggered responses ranging from acknowledgement and gratitude to disapproval and outrage, referring to the “traditional” inferior social position of children and interpreting greater participation of children as a threat to the existing order. Within the context of a larger project on the role of online media in constructing, negotiating, and practicing children’s active citizenship, this pilot study explores media representations of under-age civil actors and investigates the process of discursive construction of youth activism 1) across different segments of Czech online media discourse 2) in relation to concrete topics provoking offline and/or online public engagement. Following the principles of the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse studies (Reisigl – Wodak 2009), the study identifies discursive strategies of media representation of youth in relation to activism, with special focus on the locally-specific interpretation of private/collective engagement.

ABSTRACT. Bhartiya Janata Party’s rise to power in India has led to a collapse in Media Freedom and democratic free speech of Indian citizens. There has been an increasing attack on journalists and academics who have critiqued the BJP government as a scare tactic to suppress criticism of the government. The student community who tried to ‘voice’ their dissent have faced escalating criticism by the media who have branded them ‘anti-national’. Clearly, there is a pattern of silencing voices by the current government. However, since 2014, the rise in social movements within university spaces attest to the fact that even though there are authoritarian surveillances, protests have mushroomed across the sub-continent. This paper investigates the culture of wall-art in three public universities in India and analyses the semiotic nature of communication through extensive ethnographic research. The act of wall art itself is considered illegal and remarks that are considered anti-BJP are equivalent to treason. The use of semiotics is a dexterous way to disseminate crucial information otherwise not spoken about. This is an important context to understand the challenges of birthing a social movement within Indian university campus spaces. Amongst student communities in the three universities, communication through wall-art is not direct but encrypted and it has become one of the most popular forms of expressions and political dissent. In this empirical paper I discuss how one of the key findings of wall art in Indian universities, the use of the trope of semiotics facilitates communication.

ABSTRACT. Sonic anthropology is a model of public scholarship that reinscribes local aural histories into contemporary global cultures of listening, from remixing archives to reimagining cultures. ReSoundings: Tuning into Archives and Community Radio, a forthcoming documentary radio and podcast series, will connect community radio stations with historical and ethnographic sound archives. Currently in development at Wave Farm, the series features members of historically underrepresented, marginalized, and indigenous groups speaking for themselves to a global audience. ReSoundings demonstrates how 21st-century community radio, hyperlocal and transnational at the same time, can be a tool for decolonization. Archival recordings have an important role to play, not just as voices from the past, but as primary sources which challenge the textual dominance of historical narratives and bear seeds of an alternative future. Program topics include prison radio; grassroots radio stations in Africa, Asia, North America and South America; clandestine radio in conflict zones; and underground radio in New York and London. The presentation will include a project overview and audio excerpts from the work in progress, with voices from archives and community radio stations around the world.

ABSTRACT. National Prison Radio (NPR) gives voice to people in prison whilst providing high-quality 24-hour programming. The quality of the radio’s production is evidenced by the many media awards and praise that NPR has received. The impact of NPR on the lives of people in prison is less visible. Based on ongoing research and evaluation work undertaken by the authors with Prison Radio Association, this paper focuses on the challenges of assessing and evidencing the impact on NPR on its very particular, but vast and diverse audience. The paper discusses how sound, music and voices are central to the life of people in prison arguing that the radio form is as crucial as the content of the messages it may carry in contributing to an environment of hope, interconnection, wellbeing and sense of agency that are crucial to open up the possibility of rehabilitation. The paper dialogues with literature on sound and music in prison, community media and the power of broadcasting, discussing collaborative and qualitative methodological approaches to evidencing impact and change.

ABSTRACT. Most community radio (CR) stations in the UK offer news in some form. This includes announcements of cultural and other events, interviews with local artists or volunteers and similar. What community radio offers much less is ‘hard news’. Previous research has established that the majority of CRs in Scotland wish to dedicate more time in their programming to local news and current affairs but that their volunteers lack the journalistic skills around news gathering and writing, and confidence around regulatory issues. The proposed paper will present the results of a Scottish Community Radio skills assessment study conducted between Nov 2021 - June 2022 which aims to assess the journalistic skills and needs of community radio volunteers in Scotland, so that they can assume a (bigger) role in local news provision, with a view that this should lead to the design and delivery of training courses to CR volunteers. The proposed paper will also discuss ways in which the current skills assessment study can become a template for engagement of HEIs with the practitioners in the radio sector in Scotland and beyond.

ABSTRACT. Women’s participation in community radio, is critical to maintaining local interest in community development and the success of Communication for Development programmes. In Northern Ghana culture and religion have historically excluded women from being active users of the media, women have had low participation in the public sphere and the dialogues that lead to the transformation of their communities. Community radio as a development agent presents an opportunity for rural women to participate in the public sphere. Using Radio Listenership Clubs (RLCs) as a participatory forum for rural women in community radio has not been thoroughly understood. The purpose of this study was to assess how RLCs are being used to harness the participation of women in the programmes and activities of community radio stations in Northern Ghana. A cross-sectional study involving 5 randomly selected community radio stations and 100 randomly selected women listeners were used. Focused group discussions were used to collect data between January 2021 and May 2021. We collected data on how RLCs are improving and expanding the net for women’s participation in community radio stations. The study reveals that through RLCs, women are able to create radio content and form alliances which aid the diffusion of new agricultural technology, by listening and producing their own programmes. We conclude that the use of RLCs are expanding women’s access and use of the media and helps to reduce the vulnerability of women in the household and village setting. We recommend the establishment of more women focused RLCs

ABSTRACT. Soap opera as a genre always had a complicated relationship with queerness and the representation of LGBTQIA+ characters. While soap operas in the UK had incorporated queer and trans characters, US soap operas were more conservative in including regular queer characters. Although between the mid-2000s to late 2010s, US soap operas introduced more permanent queer characters, the last couple of years, the number of queer characters either decreased or queer characters completely disappeared from the soap operas. For example, Will and Sonny left Days of Our Lives. General Hospital’s gay, lesbian and trans characters became invisible, and The Young and the Restless’ writing team have been struggling to offer compelling stories for the show’s only lesbian couple. Similarly, while there are significantly more queer characters in Hollyoaks, most of the queer characters departed from the other British soap operas. For example, Emmerdale’s fan-favorite Aaron and Robert are now gone, and the show has not successfully introduced new gay characters. Likewise, EastEnders only have no more than two-three queer characters on the show at any given time nowadays. In this paper, I argue that the disappearance of queer characters in soap opera realities represents the conservative turn in our political and social life. Media representations, including soap operas, often mirror, and if not, they respond to these political and social tendencies. Hence, I examine the representation of queer characters in British and US soap operas in the 2020s.

ABSTRACT. This thesis aims to critically engage with slacktivism, a dismissive assessment of online political activity, through the lens of collective identity in the context of Chinese LGBTQ activism. By using content analysis and digital ethnography, a mixed-method approach using both quantitative and qualitative research methods, it explores the case study of the #IAmGay movement on Weibo. The problematic slacktivist critique argues that minor forms of activism on social networking sites (SNSs) have zero impact on political causes and only serve to fulfil participants’ ego, driving them away from participating in meaningful offline political activities (Morozov, 2009). This thesis proposes a new approach to understanding slacktivism by linking it with collective identity, a concept that has been developed in social movement studies to refer to a shared definition of ‘we’ amongst collective action participants (Melucci, 1989, 1995; Hunt et al., 1994; Snow, 2001). It argues that through minor political action online, participants can construct and reform their collective identity. Meanwhile, this thesis also bridges the gap between particular western theories, i.e. slacktivism and collective identity, and practices of Chinese LGBTQ activism in an original way. China has a unique political environment where explicit forms of LGBTQ activism are usually not allowed and often censored on SNSs. The environment creates specific opportunities and constraints. Therefore, this thesis argues that under such circumstances, it is important for Chinese LGBTQ individuals to participate in so-called slacktivism, as during the process they construct and reform their collective identity to sustain activism.

ABSTRACT. This paper will discuss Hungry Wives, the least considered of all the works of independent auteur horror filmmaker George A. Romero. Significantly, Hungry Wives, unlike many of the texts offered up as part of a second-wave feminist discourse, argues that an active female agency can not only be better realised but also better supported through belonging to a powerful yet privatised female-centric community. Uniquely, the spiritual as opposed to the political is wielded as an efficacious tool in the service of establishing both personal identity-building and social empowerment as the members of this domestic upper middle-class suburban community accept Witchcraft as an anathema to an isolating, male-dominated, phallocentric universe. For indeed as a Pagan, pre-Christian faith held long before religion became patriarchal, Witchcraft affords a uniquely efficacious opportunity to enact a space for active matriarchal agency. It might be argued that many of the films produced in the 1970s similarly debate gender roles, and familial positioning. This was, after all, a time that questioned many grand narratives that once provided meaning and social cohesion. However, through presenting a positive and powerful representation of the Witch as a feminist icon, Hungry Wives not only supports feminist ideology, but also acts to reverse the historical stigma associated with the more pejorative idea of the crone at a time embroiled in valourising youth culture while also engaging with equally pervasive contemporaneous debates surrounding the private versus the political and the spiritual versus the secular.

ABSTRACT. In 2009 Uganda gained notoriety for proposing one of the world’s harshest laws – The Anti-homosexuality bill- against same-sex relationships. The Bill capitalized on social anxieties stemming for globalization, donor dependency, growing social disparities (Peters 2014, Sandgrove 2012) and led to a surge in anti- LGBT+ hostility (SMUG 2016). Ugandan media responded mostly with silence or demonization, only rarely allowing LGBT+ voices an opportunity to self-represent. The intense international attention in and after 2009, resulted in a considerable increase in international funding and the number of CSO mushroomed (Interview 2021). Through a mix of netnographic methods and fieldwork conducted in 2021, and analytical framework consisting of complimentary theoretical lenses of rhetoric and network media logic; this paper explores 13 Ugandan LGBT+ CSOs’ self-representation in digital spaces. The study find that local actors have adopted conspicuously similar rhetoric to describe organizational scope and work methods. The analyzed organizations’ remarkably similar self-narrative indicates an adoption of a template for human rights activism that is rooted in Western-derived identity politics which features Western understandings of sexual identity and sexual preferences as relatively fixed and exclusive categories. CSO’s does thus not appear to be inspired by less stringent local understanding of SOGIESC (sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics) language, which allows individuals to inhabit multiple and diverse SOGIESC positions simultaneously (Peters 2014, Murray, and Roscoe. 1998, Summers 1991). The study raise serious questions around the unintended consequences of international actors’ funding practices and preferences, including preferential treatment of lingua franca NGOish.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this research is to make visible a new collective ethnic and racial category in the United Kingdom: ‘East and Southeast Asian’ (ESEA, 0.7 %–2.1% of the population, Lu, 2021) through researching news coverage during 2020 and 2021. The term ESEA, coming to prominence recently in the UK (Thorpe and Yeh, 2018), is used as a bottom-up collective ethnic identifier for communities who have suffered institutional and cultural exclusion. This study builds on the media evidence from the early months of COVID-19 and theorisation (Pofi and Leung, 2021; Leung 2020) that reveals the biopolitical effects of longstanding racist discourses, and social and political constructions around East Asian migrants in Europe, against the backdrop of intensifying anti-Asian racism and violence (300% increase in the UK (Kahn, 2021); some 3800 reported assaults against Asians in the US (Nguyen, 2021) over the first year of Covid). This paper will present findings through keyword searches of leading UK newspapers, including 720 articles, during the first two years of the pandemic, quantitative measures, and qualitative critical discourse analysis. Detailed content analysis has been conducted to discover ‘relevant situations, settings, styles, images, meanings and nuances’ (Atheide, 1987, p.68). Through time-stamping the news articles, the analysis also illustrates changing attitudes and discourses over the 24 months against the political and cultural backdrop. This paper demonstrates the (in)visibility of the ESEA communities in British society and aims to shed light on the way forward to conduct impactful research that tackles political exclusion, including academic-activist groups collaborations.

ABSTRACT. The overwhelming negativity of news coverage during the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated a process, which had taken off since longer: News audiences switching entirely off from news. In this paper, we do not focus on news avoidance as such, but investigate possible reasons for why audiences actually stay tuned in und continue to engage with news positively, even during a pandemic.

We propose that people with high levels of self-efficacy and optimism will encounter a more positive news experience, means they respond more positively and less negatively to Covid-19 news. Self-efficacy and optimism are both core principles of positive psychology (McIntyre and Gyldensted 2018). While self-efficacy is a concept already explored in news user studies, which describes the individual’s belief in their own capacity to achieve (Bandura 1982), optimism remains so far underresearched in journalism studies.

Drawing on a survey with more than 2,000 participants from the UK and using both bivariate correlation and regression analysis, this study investigates how both personality traits interact with the consumption of news during the pandemic in the United Kingdom.

Our preliminary findings are encouraging. At this stage of analysis, a moderate impact of both self-efficacy and optimism on positive news consumption experience can be observed, and, to a lesser extent, on positive appreciation of news. Here, especially items relating to collective efficacy scored highly.

Based on these promising results we hope to broaden the understanding of the two concepts of optimism and self-efficacy in the context of journalism, news consumption, and mental wellbeing.

ABSTRACT. Research into the essential democratic function of journalism recently has focused on how people access and engage with news in high-choice media environments (e.g. Fletcher & Nielsen, 2018; Möller et al., 2020; Stier et al., 2021), implicitly sharing the assumption that exposure to and engagement with political news is democratically desirable. However, research rarely explores the question to what extent the actual news content lives up to its assumed ideal democratic role. This paper aims to help fill this gap. Following Strömbäck (2005), the paper investigates the type of democracy the sample news selection and texts represented. As a case study, it considers news on mainstream media during the Covid-19 pandemic in two Western democracies. It focusses on quality news outlets because these tend to be judged as positive models for democratic media, providing the most trustworthy news (Toff et al., 2021). This paper compares the news coverage of twelve national news websites in Germany and the UK, six in each country, during two time periods at an early and a later stage during the pandemic. A text corpus of news stories (N=420) was built, selecting the top five stories from six British and German mainstream news websites over two one-week periods in 2020 and 2021 each. The corpus was analysed using content analysis. Differences in respect to which democratic role news media adopt were found on the country-level, the level of media type (in particular between right- and left-leaning media outlets), and to some degree on the temporal level.

ABSTRACT. In the COVID-19 time, a growing number of Chinese consumers have relied on the internet to satisfy their daily shopping demands due to travel restrictions and the concern of infection. Because of digital shopping, consumers are not able to have an encounter with the products in-person before purchase so that online professional guidance offers insights to lead consumption. Over the past two years, the professional introduction from ordinary consumers of similar products has emerged in digital space. These consumers shared their user experience and professional knowledge about certain products to benefit the following consumers. Because of their professional guidance, these hidden consumers turned to become grassroots celebrities with thousands of followers.

This article thereby examines an interesting phenomenon of grassroots celebrity culture in China because ordinary consumers have become internet celebrities (Wanghong in Chinese) due to their professionality on commodities and consumption. It underlines professionality as a new public persona and fame of celebrities. Employing the netnography method (including online observation, digital interaction, and digital scarping) and commentary and discourse analyses approach, we examine how grassroots celebrity promoted the knowledge-sharing economy in the featured digital sphere in China. Our study reveals two facets of this phenomenon: a). professionality becomes the new and key persona and fame of being celebrities, and serves as an asset for e-business and entrepreneurism, which enriches the context of Chinese celebrity studies; b). grassroots-turned-celebrities further cultivate idol-fan and advertiser-consumer relationships – as they maintain an authentic celebrity persona of professionality and reliability in the attention economy.