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- Seuferling, Philipp
(författare)
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Media and the refugee camp : The historical making of space, time, and politics in the modern refugee regime
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation explores media practices in and of refugee camps. In the wake of forced migration becoming ever more digitized both in its experiences and its governance, this thesis historicizes media practices in refugee camps as a space of the refugee regime. In various historical contexts in Germany after 1945, this study analyses archival material in order to trace media practices in the making of refugee camps’ space, time, and politics, and thereby provides historical insights into circularities, ruptures, and continuities of media practices and their entanglement with being and being made a refugee. Refugee camps spatialize the modern “refugee regime” (Betts, 2010) as a hegemonic mode of governing forced migration. Being paradoxical tools of both shelter and humanitarian relief and at the same time segregation and exclusion, refugee camps are “heterotopian and heterochronic spaces” (Foucault, 1967/1997): othered, paradoxical spaces and times, simultaneously inside and outside of society, a temporary limbo, withholding outcasts from nation-based, bordered societies while at the same time constituting these very societies.The holistic concept of media practices (Couldry, 2004) describes how social practices of mediation and communication enable, shape, and condition socialities and materialities of the refugee camp: media as enabling environments, technologies, and techniques (Peters, 2015) construct, negotiate, and make the camp’s heterotopian and heterochronic condition. By way of media practices, camp residents, staff and authorities, NGOs and governments as well as activists, establish, maintain or alter the social relations of the camp heterotopia and heterochronia. Relating to the space, time, and politics of the camp, these media practices are conceptualized as heterotopian, heterochronic and heteropolitical media practices, which shape and negotiate the differentiation, other-ness and paradoxical inclusions and exclusions from time and space, which refugee camps thrive on.Archival records from the post-war period of ca. 1945 to 1960, and the 1980s and 1990s, provide traces of historical media practices from camp residents, authorities within the refugee regime, and activists and other communities. Three analytical chapters explore heterotopian, heterochronic and heteropolitical media practices. Firstly, heterotopian camp space is produced, governed and controlled through media practices around media infrastructure, such as architecture, media-technological equipment, and administrative practices. Secondly, refugee camps are heterochronic limbos with multiple ruptured temporalities that are managed through media practices of memory and witnessing. Thirdly, heteropolitical media practices are forms of altering and challenging the othering politics of the camp space and camp time through forms of resistance and protest.This thesis re-evaluates historical media practices in and of the refugee camp from the perspective of the digitized refugee regime and experience, and showcases trajectories of media practices that (regardless of media technological environment) have been employed in projects of negotiating and coping with being and being made a refugee. This thesis thereby challenges a rhetoric of newness around digital technologies and contributes theoretically, epistemologically, and empirically to the study of media and migration. By pointing out the complicitness and existentiality of media practices in making, differentiating, and relating space, time, and politics in bordered states, the thesis ultimately argues for an approach to media studies from the margins to help understand how seemingly peripheral spaces mirror and co-construct media practices in society more generally.
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| 2. |
- Sõmersalu, Liisa, 1983-
(författare)
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Civic Cultures in Eastern Europe : Communication spaces and media practices of Estonian civil society organizations
- 2022
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- What kind of routine media and communication practices do Estonian civil society organizations enact in their everyday work? What sort of symbolic and physical spaces are used, created, and accessed by Estonian civil society organizations and informal citizen groups when engaging internally and with their target groups? How do these spaces and practices evolve over time? These are the questions this dissertation addresses, with the aim of understanding the ways in which already-established and evolving civil society organizations navigate the highly-mediated everyday through their routine media practices and the spaces in which these practices are situated.Theoretically, this study takes a cultural approach to political participation with the concept of ‘civic cultures’ (Dahlgren 2009, p. 103) in the centrum. In this dissertation, the civic cultures framework is concentrated into a focus on the everyday, on media practices, and on communicative spaces. The concepts of ‘everyday’ and ‘spaces’ are empirically accessed through a practice approach. To distill and explore the role of media in the everyday work of civil society organizations, this thesis borrows from “activist media practices” (Mattoni 2012, p. 159) framework.The empirical study is grounded in the wider geopolitical context of Eastern Europe and in the historical context of post-Soviet Europe, and more specifically in Estonian civil society. Using a multi-methods approach based on media ethnography, this study includes a nationally-representative survey, in-depth interviews with civil society organizations, and a longitudinal study of the Estonian Forest Aid movement.This study found that parallel to striving towards episodic visibility in physical spaces, in mainstream media, and in decision making, civil society organizations worked on constant visibility in the social media space. The most used social media platform, Facebook, proved to be an important space for developing civic cultures on an everyday level: it was used for campaigns, opinion shaping, for disseminating news, and for civic talk. Everyday communication within the organizations was done using a mix of different media technologies and face-to-face meetings. Each media technology and communicative space had their own role and function in the everyday work of Estonian civil society organizations.
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| 3. |
- Kaun, Anne, 1983-
(författare)
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Civic experiences and public connection : media and young people in Estonia
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- How do young people in Estonia experience the political, politics and citizenship? How are these civic experiences connected to young peoples’ experiences with the media? Anne Kaun’s thesis Civic Experiences and Public Connection presents a theoretical and empirical investigation of how civic experiences, particularly public connection, emerge in the context of contemporary Estonia. Employing open-ended online diaries and in-depth interviews, she aims to develop an in-depth understanding of how young people experience democracy today, and how they express themselves as citizens; expression not only through the physical performance of citizenship, but also through orientation, interest in, and reflection about issues that are of common concern or should be seen as such. The empirical investigation of public connection as critical media connection, playful public connection and historical public connection, is based on narrative analysis and embedded in a theoretical exploration of key concepts in the context of civic culture studies, namely the political, politics and citizenship.Combining Chantal Mouffe’s conflict theory with Paul Ricoeur’s narrative identity, Kaun aims to shed light on contemporary democracy from the citizens’ perspective. The author proposes a holistic approach to both civic experiences and the role that media might play in relation to them. Following a non-media- centric approach, she shows that media, despite their ubiquity, are an important but not exclusive source of the civic experiences of young adults in Estonia.
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| 4. |
- Najem, Chafic T., 1991-
(författare)
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Smuggle, Frame, Shoot : Illicit Media Practices and Visual Insurgency from Lebanese Incarceration
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This research explores prisoners’ illicit use of digital-media technology during their incarceration in Lebanon. Prisoners smuggle cellphones and access internet and telecommunication connection to produce and mediate videos, images, and voice recordings documenting quotidian experiences of imprisonment, violent events, and the COVID-19 Pandemic inside the notorious and overcrowded Roumieh Central Prison. Fragmentary prison amateur cellphone media messages make their way from behind bars to various media ecologies, from social media to local and international news-media platforms, where they are (re)mediated and often appropriated to feed partisan and sectarian media narratives. In this dissertation, I investigate prison cellphone recordings and their political and testimonial possibilities by tracing the prison media practices responsible for their production and circulation. Influenced by Amel’s (1976, 1988) intellectual project of theorizing from the periphery and the lo popular approach to theorizing media with and from individuals’ media practices in their territory (Martín-Barbero, 1998), I propose a framework for the conceptualization of prisoners’ illicit use of digital-media technologies and the recordings they produce as media from the prison. Based on a foundation of media-practice theory, more specifically the articulation of activist media practices and mediation theory (Martín-Barbero, 1993; Mattoni, 2012; Mattoni & Treré, 2014), I introduce three overarching and overlapping conceptual themes: media witnessing, media mobilization, and vulnerability in resistance. Using this theoretical framework, I examine the categories, characteristics, and modes of framing reflected in prison cellphone recordings, explore their alignment with mechanisms of mobilization and organized protest, and consider them as visual and sonic recorded testimonies that document and communicate personal impressions and the conditions of quotidian life in confinement. The analysis draws on a qualitative, multi-method approach combining visual analysis and contextual interviews. Location- and event-based searches were used to systematically collect a corpus of prison cellphone recordings remediated between 2011 and 2022 on Facebook, YouTube, and local and international news-media platforms. I propose the notion of visual insurgency as a step towards understanding the role and function of recordings that are produced and mediated through inherently prohibited media practices. Through the examination of composition, POV, frame, sound, (re)mediation, and the partisan context of Lebanon and the colonial history of its prisons, I trace the illicit media practices responsible for these prison representations. I claim that, through their media practices, prisoners mediate from the prison testimonies of their lived experiences, expose their vulnerabilities to the precarious conditions they exist in, re-claim a sense of mundanity, and incite feelings of affinity to mobilize support. I conclude that prison cellphone recordings are the result of meticulous prison media practices that are intended to actively mobilize support and sympathy, as well as to establish communication networks with affiliates and media personnel. Prison media practices continue to grow as prisoners smuggle digital-media technologies, develop new approaches to framing their testimonies and shooting the precarious environment, stories, performative assemblies, and lived experiences behind bars.
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