The community media assemblage - community media theory through the lens of the discursive-material knot
Nico Carpentier, Uppsala University
The starting point for the presentation is a section from the book "The Discursive-Material Knot: Cyprus in Conflict and Community Media Participation" (Peter Lang, 2017), entitled "Defining Community Media Organizations". This section revisits earlier work on community media and participation (Carpentier et al., 2003), which argued for a combination of four approaches to better understand community media organizations: serving the community, being an alternative to the mainstream, being part of civil society and being part of a rhizome, all of which were structured through the nodal point of participation. In Carpentier's more recent work, more attention is spent on embedding community media theory in an ontology that combines attention for the discursive and the material, in the search for a non-hierarchical combination of discourse theory and new materialism. These theoretical reflections also allow highlighting the contingency of assemblages, the political nature of their fixations, and the role of agential matter. In "The Discursive-Material Knot", this rethinking and re-reading of community media theory is illustrated and strengtened by a detailed case study on the Cyprus Community Media Centre (CCMC), a community media assemblage that combines a participatory agenda with a conflict transformation agenda.
BIO
Nico Carpentier is Professor in Media and Communication Studies at the Department of Informatics and Media of Uppsala University. In addition, he holds two part-time positions, those of Associate Professor at the Communication Studies Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Docent at Charles University in Prague. He is a Research Fellow at the Cyprus University of Technology and Loughborough University. Earlier books are Understanding Alternative Media (2007, co-authored with Olga Bailey and Bart Cammaerts), and Media and Participation: A Site of Ideological-Democratic Struggle (2011).
http://nicocarpentier.net