Radia Amari
University of Colorado at Boulder
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Lupe Fiasco and IslamiCity.com: Situating the 'I' in Islam
ABSTRACT: This essay problematizes claims that Muslims, who are deemed innately un–"modern", become "modern" through "modern" media forms that allow for the emergence of the "individual". Through an analysis of Lupe Fiasco's lyrics and the website content of IslamiCity.com, I demonstrate that individual interpretation and the modern technology used by these producers do not make a Muslim de facto modern; there already exists a long Islamic tradition of ijtihad (critical individual interpretation). And, very conservative tradition Islamic legal experts have gained international attention for their anti–modern views through their presence on the Internet. Therefore, it is not enough to simply say that Muslims are modern because they are creating and participating in Western forms of media. I will examine how this assumption unnecessarily privileges, what I term here as the Muslim subject, whose "agency" is privileged and unquestioned, over the discursive practices that have brought this subject into being a Muslim.
Tyler Baber
The New School for General Studies
Graduate Program in Media Studies
The Google Filter: The propaganda model and the global digital media industry
ABSTRACT: Google has emerged as a dominant ideological apparatus of globalization through digital media. Because Google alters the way information is produced, distributed and accessed an updated propaganda model is required to understand how global digital media function politically and economically. The new business and political practices of the global digital media industry call for a reexamining of the filters Herman and Chomsky identified when they proposed the propaganda model in the 1980s. By restructuring modes of ownership and sourcing, updating profit mechanisms for content and distribution, and establishing itself as a corporation with a "Don't Be Evil" motto, Google attempts to discredit both traditional media forms and nation–state political systems operating counter to the political ideology of global, America–centric capitalism. A critical analysis of the ideological myths disseminated by Google through the five filters of the propaganda model is necessary to better understand how the global digital media industry operates.
Monica Brannon
The New School for Social Research
Department of Sociology
Technological Imperialism?: Satellite imaging and new configurations of knowledge/power
ABSTRACT: The recent commercialization of satellite remote sensing technology has transformed how information is transferred and dispersed on a global scale. Following science and technology scholars, this paper will uncover the relationships and divides between "first world/ third world" as well as other traditional dichotomies by exploring the role that this technology plays in configurations of 'space.' Tracing from its beginnings in military surveillance through Cold War to its multi–varied uses today, including the buying and selling of images of nation states, this paper argues that satellite technology is used as an inherently political device that can operate tools of empire while simultaneously challenging local/global divides through the location of satellites and occupation in 'outer' space.
Pamela Brown
The New School for General Studies
Graduate Program in Media Studies
Moving the Net Neutrality Debate Forward by Changing the Conversation
ABSTRACT: The recent Comcast case involving their use of "network management" practices to block peer–to–peer file transfers has challenged the FCC to uphold their Internet Policy Statement, and has called attention to the issue of codifying net neutrality principles once again. In spite of the FCC's enforcement of this policy, Comcast has continued to test its boundaries, even objecting to the FCC's authority to regulate the Internet at all. Thus far, the net neutrality debate has centered on business and technological concerns, leaving the subtext of this conversation rarely examined or challenged. The paper argues that although refuting anti–neutrality arguments on both practical and philosophical grounds is necessary, the underlying neoliberal framework to this debate necessitates a fundamental shift in the conversation. The ongoing Comcast case and the opportunity of new American leadership make this a critical time to pose important value–driven arguments that center on ideals of democracy, commons and progress.
Helena Chmielewska–Szlajfer
The New School for Social Research
Department of Sociology
The Other–Others: Analysis of press coverage of nonvoters and undecided voters
during the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign
ABSTRACT: Analysis of articles in The New York Times and USA Today on the last US presidential campaign in the aspect of nonvoters, who form a category still different from the usual "Us" (voting for a given candidate) and "Others" (voting for the other candidate). Undecided (for whom or whether to vote) voters and nonvoters are the "other–others", and are compared to "obtuse publics"—visible only through scientific methods (e.g. statistics). The main issue discussed is that of invisibility in media. Nonvoters are essentially invisible, even though some studies try to analyze their silence. The undecided are entitled to some amount of visibility, but it is a visibility of stigmatization; they are treated with embarrassment and irritation. The paper discusses the modalities of 'stigma visibility' but its main theoretical concern is the invisibility of a "missing electorate" that in these elections included more than a third of eligible citizens.
Santiago Dellepiane
The New School for General Studies
Graduate Program in Media Studies
Kilowatts and Kilobytes: A media studies focus on new energy management technologies
ABSTRACT: The framework for energy management, in particular electricity distribution to American homes, appears to be moving towards a more transparent and instantaneous sharing of metering information. In a context of growing awareness for environmental issues, homes are beginning to incorporate new technologies in the form of sophisticated energy meters, which serve as interfaces to better manage their energy use. This paper reviews media studies and other literature in an attempt to build a framework for analyzing new technologies for measurement, delivery and sharing of energy-related information. Looking at the characteristics of the new metering technologies under this framework suggests that the interfaces can be developed to emphasize or achieve differing but not mutually exclusive objectives. While the electricity commodity is taken for granted in the U.S., this initial research also suggests that flexibility can be introduced for consumers to have control over the consumption of the commodity, thereby incorporating it as another variable that is explicitly or implicitly decided as part of household rituals. Finally, this paper identifies specific areas for further research on this issue, which fall into the categories of: (i) product design; (ii) the political economy of electricity distribution; and (iii) regulatory design.
Caroline Evans
University of Missouri
School of Journalism
Warriors and Hunters: The violent shaping of First Nations identity in Canadian media: 1974–1998
ABSTRACT: Usually, the media will cover First Nations without a firm grasp of their culture, language, or belief system. This often leads to misrepresentations or negative depictions of First Nations People. The portrayal of First Nations in media also contributes to the building or destruction of a national identity, real or otherwise. The conflict at Oka, Quebec for example, caused Canada to re–evaluate its identity as a peaceful country, while it caused First Nations People to reevaluate their positions within the country of Canada. This paper will examine the creation of First Nations and Inuit stereotypes in Canadian media and the cultural misunderstanding that continues their perpetuation. It will also examine the construction of identities–national and Native—in the media.
Sujata Gadkar–Wilcox
The New School for Social Research
Department of Political Science
Monstrating Visibility: Barack Obama's dramaturgical approach to the 2008 Presidential election
ABSTRACT: While presidential campaigns often employ a dramaturgical approach to constructing the visibility and image of their respective candidates, Barack Hussein Obama faced the particularly difficult task of minimizing the contentious and visible issues of race – visible by Obama's very appearance, and religious intolerance – visible by Obama's very name. Obama tackled this problem in two ways. First, Obama projected himself as a symbol of transcendence by creating what Roger Silverstone identifies as the proper distance between himself and his representation of the other. By representing diversity but speaking of a common unified purpose, Obama claimed to represent America itself, for both black and white Americans. However, prior to his political campaigning, Obama often addressed issues that specifically affected the black community in order to befit his monstration as a local community organizer. In contrast, the Obama campaign avoided, to the extent possible, discussions of race and quickly subverted images that could associate Obama with negative stereotypes of black Americans in order to support his image as a transcendent figure. Obama also avoided discussion of his father's Islamic roots by avoiding visits to American mosques and by ensuring that Muslim supporters on the campaign trail were not visible. In actively avoiding, and simultaneously suppressing, specific discussions of race and religion, Obama attempted to shift perceptions and discourse of his visible social identity, which Erving Goffman would identify as closely allied to the concept of the "front" region, to the "back" region, where only Obama and members of his team were privileged to discuss the nature of his true, complex, nuanced and potentially controversial identity.
Elizabeth E. Greenfield
New York University
German Department
How the Virtual Gemeinde Affects the Actual: Internet social networking sites and their role in shaping the German–Jewish community
ABSTRACT: In the past, a critical element to the maintenance of a community was geographical proximity, especially within minority groups. This was necessary for constant communication and contact, as well as the upkeep of tradition and ritual. In this virtual age of online communities and e–communication, the ability to create proximity in the absence thereof have changed the dynamics of traditionally close and closed communities, such as the German–Jewish community. Through the use of internet social networking sites, some public some private, the jüdische Gemeinde has simultaneously become more open and more apparent to mainstream German society and more secretive and exclusive. This project explores which aspects of the German–Jewish community remain private, which are shared with the public, and how the virtual community has altered the traditional ways of this 2000 year old community.
Andrew Hare
The New School for General Studies
Graduate Program in Media Studies
The Shift Realized: The financial crisis as the first postmodern event
ABSTRACT: We can easily understand the cultural logic inherent in the global financial crisis as a 'world historical moment,' a moment where the very tenets of globalization and mediation are being challenged at their most underlying theoretical core. However, the event also must be understood as the first global event that is wholly and uniformly a postmodern crisis. In the financial collapse of the banking and credit systems we see the most fundamental aspects of postmodernism revealing itself in material reality. I examine the crisis and how it is ultimately perfectly predicted and consummated in the ontological works of Lyotard (The Postmodern Condition), the global theories of Baudrillard (The Precession of Simulcra) and the mind–politics of Foucault (Discipline and Punish). I argue that high Modernism has remained the dominant socio–cultural mode despite the emergence of mainstream postmodern theory in the 1970s, but with the global capitalistic system in greater flux theoretically than ever before we are glimpsing the ultimate death of the last Grand Narrative in modern history. After the death of God (Nietzsche), the death of dialectic (Fukuyama, Zizek, Baudrillard), and now with the possibility of the death of late capitalism we find ourselves at another cultural cross–roads, one that can only find refuge in simulation.
Szu–Han Ho
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Visual and Critical Studies
Envisioning the Economic Imaginary
ABSTRACT: Fundamental to an understanding of a capitalist economic model are concepts of limitlessness, boundlessness, and an infinite capacity for growth. Investment horizons, frontier markets, futures, and other suggestions of the infinite pervade economic language and imagery through the guise of naturalistic or culturally–bound narratives. Even in times like the ongoing crisis, this limitlessness translates into an exponential magnitude for loss. This paper explores the notion of the economic imaginary as a shared understanding of the economy and the individual's role within it, and how this understanding is fashioned through metaphoric language, images, graphs, and other visual representation of the American political and economic discourse. It is this imaginary that produces our perception of an immeasurably complex system and the current crisis– and that subsequently influences our expectations, predictions, and further courses of action. Looking at the historical framework for imagining capitalism, it becomes clear that the dominant economic metaphors currently circulating through news media, political rhetoric, and everyday language date back to the very emergence of capitalism, and that these metaphors fall short of conveying the contemporary reality of global inter–relatedness and the causes for the recent collapse.
Amen Jaffer
The New School for Social Research
Department of Sociology
Impact of Consuming Mobile Phones on the Social Constructions of Public and Private Spaces
ABSTRACT: The use of mobile phones has altered the visual and auditory as well as the social dynamics of public space in societies all around the world. A mobile call in a public area imposes the mobile user's specific context i.e., his or her private world onto the public space. It has therefore led to social interactions where the public and private worlds mix together, interact with each other and lose their boundaries. Using Goffman's Frame Analysis and Dramaturgical Analysis, my paper will theorize the ways in which mobile consumption has altered the private–public boundary. It will also draw upon case studies from a number of different countries to compare how mobile technology effects the construction of public and private spaces in different societal contexts.
Scott Kushner
Duke University
Department of Romance Studies
Virtually Dead: Networked absence and the ethics of blogospheric reading
ABSTRACT: Blogospheric texts arrive to us always in the past tense: even the most recent blog post is always the last thing written. However, blogs simultaneously beckon toward the future, toward the next post that will appear if we will simply refresh our screens. This tension imposes a new ethical demand on virtual readers. In order to respect the fullness of our virtual interlocutors, we must read as if there's always tomorrow, remaining aware that we are always confronting potentially final words and that there might always be more to come. Informed by the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean–Luc Nancy, this paper explores the ethics of networked reading by considering the successive "Goodbye Cruel World" diaries of Armando, a political blogger whose stillborn blogosuicide led to a disappearance, a reappearance, another disappearance, a resurrection, yet another disappearance, and finally (so far) a move to a new blogospheric home.
Veronica Lawlor
The New School for General Studies
Graduate Program in Media Studies
Art & Technology: The role of "the hand" in the digital age
ABSTRACT: This paper takes a brief look at the history of art, from the cave paintings at Lascaux to recent installation art, to see how technology has affected its form and function. Drawing on the theories of Pierre Levy and Marshall McLuhan, the paper then asks the question: if computer software can accomplish the representation of the real, how do we define an artist? Drawing on the writings of John Roberts and Richard Sennett and using the art of Lev Manovich and Olafur Eliasson as case studies, this paper investigates the role of 'the hand' in art produced in such a society. It argues that yes, the hand is still a necessary part of the training and expression of an artist. Or, as Mr. Sennett writes, "simulation can be a poor substitute for tactile experience".
Russet Lederman
The New School for General Studies
Graduate Program in Media Studies
Self–Commodification: Controlling the body
ABSTRACT: Self–Commodification: Controlling the body investigates contemporary female media and performance artists' purposeful embrace of their bodies as a means of self–commodification. Through the use of video, networked media, live performance and modern technologies, the artists discussed in this paper present their dissected and indexed bodies as empowered parts supported by the various brand name possessions that they consume and wear. All of it for sale within a creative and social structure that easily acknowledges the role that contemporary commodity culture plays in their lives and art making. As artists, these women have arrived at a point where they don't just comment on the commodification of their bodies, but actively engage in a process of self–commodification – willfully controlling and promoting it for their own profit. Starting with the Dada inspired street performances of Baroness Elsa von Freytag–Loringhoven, this paper chronicles the artistic evolution and control of female self–representation. Much self–imaging found in contemporary art presents the body mediated, interpreted and reassembled through either a lens (camera) or screen (computer monitor, TV) –– the resulting works celebrate a distracted and superficial "reality" reconstructed from personal, cultural and representational dislocations reflective of 20th century consumer practices. By referencing historical, theoretical and social works by Walter Benjamin, Lizabeth Cohen, Susan Bordo and Laura Mulvey and applying them to specific artworks by Hannah Wilke, Martha Rosler, Lynda Benglis, Orlan and Chrissy Connant, this paper follows the progression and normalization of self–commodification in the practices of several contemporary female artists.
Cambra Moniz–Edwards
The New School for General Studies
Graduate Program in Media Studies
Corpo–in–Libertà: Radiobodies and the physicality of transmission
ABSTRACT: In this paper, which is part of a hybrid thesis project, I will argue that radiophonic art has significant potential to act as an artistic praxis of contemporary feminist theories. The project takes as its starting point ideas of performance of the self, both in radio art (sound pieces meant to be diffused over the electromagnetic spectrum, in real time) and in the "everyday" of lived experience. I am especially interested in the parallels between radio art that focuses on the body as its subject matter and the Judith Butler's ideas of "performative" gender, in which the "female" self "is" because it constantly articulates itself as such through the actions of the body. For Butler, it is the continuous iteration of "self" as a series of acts that therefore both creates gender and offers new ways in which to articulate it. The similarities between Butler's ideas of gender and artistic theories of body–centric radio art are striking. I will therefore attempt to expand on these ideas in this paper by detailing a philosophical basis for aurally mediating the physical form or "self" and argue for "sounding the body" artistically as a means to conceptualize in new ways specifically gendered "female" bodies that have been traditionally fractured by visual mediations.
The New Campus
Calvin Stowell, Eames Yates, Michelle Munoz-Guzman, Kristin Molloy, Rebecca Sandy, Nery Lora, Sarah Bures, Patricia Gonzalez Ramirez, Karl Mendonca
Eugene Lang College
Department of Culture and Media Studies
How to Grow a Community from the Ground
ABSTRACT: From Benedict Anderson's ideas of nationalism and "imagined communities" to Howard Rheingold's treatise on virtual communities and democracy, no discussion on community is complete without a study of the media involved. In an ongoing exploration of theoretical and practical implications of media and community, students from Eugene Lang are actively maintaining a community media Web site at thenewcampus.org for students at The New School. This paper will discuss the use of both digital and print based media as part of community building efforts in relation McLuhan's definition of "hot" and "cold" media and Harold Innis' time and space based classification of media. Further, given the participatory nature of the initiative, the paper also examine the implications of the choice of media on collective action and social change.
Tim Novak
The New School for Social Research
Department of Sociology
Revitalizing Propaganda Analysis
ABSTRACT: Despite the proliferation of propaganda on a global scale, since the inception of propaganda analysis in the early twentieth century, there has been little systematic reconstruction of the communicative paradigm upon which propaganda has come to be understood. Even with significant advances in the technologies of mass communication, the analysis of propaganda today remains largely unchanged, limited to a focus on the message content of the communication itself, with little serious examination of how new mediums of transmitting and experiencing information might necessitate a shift in the way we think about propaganda. Therefore, drawing on insights from medium theory, this paper attempts to establish a framework for propaganda analysis that accounts for the changing nature and character of political communication in light of the technological transformations that define today's global media.
Aleksandra Przegalinska
The New School for Social Research
Department of Sociology
The Nature of Media and the Media of Nature
ABSTRACT: This presentation will be an attempt to analyze Virtual Reality (VR) in terms of framework offered by cognitive science and phenomenology. It has been recently recognized that these two presumably distant disciplines operate with a similar structure of deeper understanding of virtual reality as a highly naturalistic, self–referential and multi–layer process of signification, accumulation, and transformation. VR is often described as an effect of human desire of simulation and interaction, where simulation is understood as an attempt to fool the eye and the mind, that is – to create illusions, and interaction – as a possibility to achieve an indirect contact and by means of it create as many relations with the outer–world as possible. These two desires shaped two axes. The point of their intersection is a "place" where the new, virtual medium is born. In the middle–aged scholastics the term "virtuality" referred to potentiality. Its antonym was not reality (as we would tend to think contemporarily), but actuality. In fact, "virtuality" and "actuality" were two modes of existence of reality. Henceforth, a virtual being was (and still is) able to actualize itself in many different characteristics which are – what is even more important – never ultimate and can transform themselves into something completely different and unexpected. Nowadays, VR has also become an important factor of defining borders of natural environment, physical and emotional proximity of interpersonal relationships, as well as of measuring accessibility of particular objects. Media, especially new media, make things emerge. They operate and produce new political, social and material structures. The main aim of this presentation is to briefly analyze all of these functions of the new media as producing and self–reproducing entities, stressing the appreciation of the nature of these processes and their compositional terms, as well as to indicate a new interpretation that arises from the framework offered by both disciplines. "It is an understanding that the ontogenic capacity of the media lies outside of any embedded character of particular context of being" (Joel Slayton). Examples of new media as self–referential (autopoietic), ontogenic systems will be provided. No ethical judgements, no Baudrillard–like
catastrophic prophecies. The world is not doomed.
Jason Rockwood
Massachussetts Institute of Technology
Comparative Media Studies
Technologies of the Cell: Prison Media and the Collision of Communication and Enclosure
ABSTRACT: From across the world (Belgium, Greece, Italy, the U.K. and the U.S.), the preliminary results are in: judicious media use by prison inmates is highly effective not only in terms of reducing prison disruption and violence but also but also with respect to successful reintegration of incarcerated individuals after their reentry into society. In the U.S., the Federal Bureau of Prisons' online limited inmate electronic messaging system, Oregon's video game system for prisoners and Louisiana's prison radio system are just three examples. In a prison context, ironically, media technologies have been demonstrating the potential for doing what many had hoped they could do for society at large but have seldom lived up to this expectation: dramatically improving lives and even showing the potential for saving lives, of prisoners and others. The case for use of media for this purpose is so compelling that once the evidence becomes sufficiently well–known, the practice will surely be implemented on a much wider scale.
Sananda Sahoo
University of Missouri–Columbia
Journalism Department
Fashion Coverage in a Dubai newspaper: When Globalization Frames Reportage
ABSTRACT: Dubai (in the UAE) is increasingly seen as a poster–child of modernity and globalization in the Islamic world—at times even severely criticized for being too westernized and open—in a region that is portrayed to be still struggling to come to terms with modernity amid Islamic traditions. Evolving framing of fashion coverage in Dubai newspapers contradict this simplification. Argument: This paper will try to explore whether the fashion coverage captures a tension, if any, that comes from grappling with globalization and modernity and the need for it amid a continuing and vigorous debate on the loss of traditional values and its religious and cultural identity. To explore the hypothesis, this paper will look at whether this conflict frames editorial decisions on fashion coverage in Dubai's one of the two oldest newspapers, Gulf News. The methodology adopted would be a combination of quantitative and interpretative analyses of fashion articles and photographs available in the paper's online archives during 2007 and 2008.
Anezka Sebek
The New School for Social Research
Department of Sociology
CRASH! Rollerderby Makes a Come–back
ABSTRACT: This ethnographic field study of women skaters in several new rollerderby leagues explores the issue of the sense of touch that underlies the empowerment of women through contact sports in America. Women in their twenties and thirties are the first beneficiaries of Title IX legislation that gave girls access to playing physically aggressive contact sports. These women then re–ignited the heretofore male–owned sport of rollerderby and claimed control over it. A fire–storm of girl–owned flat track derby leagues quickly spread all over the US and the world. This challenging high–speed sport combined with the 1990s Riot Grrrl Punk movement found a new expression through social networking internet technology on MySpace and Facebook. The sport is also a highly entertaining spectator sport that questions 21st century definitions of feminism.
Kristina R. Sherry
University of Missouri–Columbia
School of Journalism
Proper Names and Privacy: Respecting rape victims in the media
ABSTRACT: Should rape victims be identified by the news media? And if yes, under which circumstances? This paper examines the historical and legal context of the "naming issue," which rose to the level of national discussion in the 1970s, was resurrected in the early 1990s, and remains open for debate today, despite the fact that most news organizations espouse a policy of not publishing rape victims' names without their consent. Recent cases will be summarized to illustrate why adhering to a blanket naming (or not–naming) policy is more difficult than it seems. Nonetheless, it will be argued that even in this age of the Internet and the 24–hour news cycle, privacy is still a fundamental human right that news organizations have both practical and ethical duties to uphold, especially in cases in which rape victims do not wish to be identified.
Erica Shusas
The New School for General Studies
Graduate Program in Media Studies
From Folksonomies to Collective Intelligence: A Study of Collaborative Tagging on Social Bookmarking Sites
ABSTRACT: Social bookmarking sites, like del.icio.us, that allow users to collectively tag websites, have become increasingly popular in the past few years as a way for people to both organize and find information on the Internet. Tagging empowers individuals within communities to name, define, label and classify websites at their own discretion, developing a form of collaborative information organization referred to as a folksonomy. If by looking at the control of information in a society we can learn something about that society, what can collaborative tagging and the growing acceptance of folksonomies reveal about the changes that are happening in our own digitally enabled society? Building upon Michel Foucault's theories of knowledge and power, and Jean–François Lyotard's theories of knowledge in computerized societies, I argue that sites like del.icio.us, that are reliant on collective knowledge and collaborative tagging, change the status of knowledge in this newest era of technology.
Aleksandra Solak
The New School for General Studies
Graduate Program in Media Studies
The Romance of Wall–E: Disney's animated ideology
ABSTRACT: The box office topper, Wall–E, is not only at the frontier in graphic animation but also conveys critical social themes, which exemplify the technological perversion of humanity. The film shows a parallel with great societal movements, specifically the Romantic Movement, which later sparked an outgrowth to the Pre– Raphaelite Movement, Arts and Crafts Movement, Neo–Luddism, Anti–Industrialism and Post–Modernism. In my paper, I will examine how the movie Wall–E depicts ways in which technology demoralizes the organic world and suggests a quest of going back to the simple life by juxtaposing the film against the ideologies of the Romantic Movement —specifically show the ideological parallel between art, i.e. the works of JMW Turner, as well as literature such as Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, which derived from the Romantic Movement and their similarities to the film Wall–E. Through these historical contexts we can conceptualize the echoes of history in the contemporary film thus proving that history indeed repeats its–self and the battle of the natural versus the technological or the concept of man versus machine continually lingers.
Nathan Taylor
Villanova University
Personal Audio Manipulation Technology: Control, interiority, and cross–modal interaction
ABSTRACT: This paper examines the aural dimensions of personal audio manipulation devices as part of the mass cultural sonic environment. Its position informed by a phenomenological account of audition, this paper argues that personal audio manipulation technology, such as the iPod, allows users to control their positioning at the center of an auditory universe. By allowing users to manage their aural environment, this technology not only subverts the paradigm of the urban sonic barrage by putting users in control of what they hear, but also fundamentally changes how users perceive their environments as a result of cross–modal sensoric interaction. Unintended consequences are thoroughly discussed and delineated.
Trinidad Valle
Fordham University
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Chilean Media Discourse on Ethnic Minorities: Constructing the Mapuche subject
ABSTRACT: This paper analyzes the mainstream media discourse regarding ethnic minorities (Mapuches) in Chile, emphasizing the preferred framing strategies. The paper argues that the Chilean mainstream media proposes contradictory images of the Mapuches. One the one hand, the Mapuches are presented as a symbol of the past, of our common origins and of our lost connection with nature. But on the other hand, the Mapuches are also portrayed as aggressive, conflictive and deviant in the news. The idealized historical Mapuche is constructed as the symbol of the mestizo origins of the nation, while the living Mapuche is depicted as a deviant actor who is threatening the social order. Independent media outlets supported by Mapuche organizations provide alternative perspectives. As a result, an extended universe of discourse is conformed, where symbolic struggles over the power of naming are constantly being reenacted.
Alexander Wentland
The New School for Social Research
Department of Sociology
Digital Media, Morality And The Himalaya: The changing political economy of global visibility
ABSTRACT: On March 14th 2008 the "Roof of the World" caught fire. In this paper, I want to examine the violent uprising in Tibet and the related social movement for the liberation of Tibet with regard to changing regimes of global visibility. I will argue that digital media have empowered subaltern publics and political activists to address their claims and mobilize supporters worldwide. These shifting relations of symbolic power, however, have also transformed the political economy of attention, facilitating new inequality and exclusion. The question of how the changing shape of communicational networks can be integrated into the moral foundations of a global public sphere might decide what path globalization is going to take. Will the emerging mediascapes become the fertile ground for a "global civil society" or the battlefield of a "global civil war"?
