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Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe presents a collection of sixteen chapters that explore the themes of how migrants, refugees and citizens express and share their political and social causes and experiences through art and media. These expressions, which we term ‘citizen media’, arguably become a platform for postcolonial intellectuals as the studies pursued in this volume investigate the different ways in which previously excluded social groups regain public voice. The volume strives to understand the different articulations of migrants’, refugees’, and citizens’ struggle against increasingly harsh European politics that allow them to achieve and empower political subjectivity in a mediated and creative space. In this way, the contributions in this volume present case studies of citizen media in the form of ‘activistic art’ or ‘artivism’ (Trandafoiu, Ruffini, Cazzato & Taronna, Koobak & Tali, Negrón-Muntaner), activism through different kinds of technological media (Chouliaraki and Al-Ghazzi, Jedlowski), such as documentaries and film (Denić), podcasts, music and soundscapes (Romeo and Fabbri, Western, Lazzari, Huggan), and activisms through writings from journalism to fiction (Longhi, Concilio, Festa, De Capitani). The volume argues that citizen media go hand in hand with postcolonial critique because of their shared focus on the deconstruction and decolonisation of Western logics and narratives. Moreover, both question the concept of citizen and of citizenship as they relate to the nation-state and explores the power of media as a tool for participation as well as an instrument of political strength. The book forwards postcolonial artivism and citizen media as a critical framework to understand the refugee and migrant situations in contemporary Europe.

Drawing on postcolonial critique to analyze the work and political purpose of activist groups on social media, this article asks the question: How do digital media communications simultaneously reinstate binary oppositions and invite rhizomatic relations? While the concept of counterpublics is helpful when it comes to understanding the voices of opposition in public discourse, it is also necessary to introduce postcolonial critique and geopolitical and historical distinctions in order to grasp the particularities of global digital activism (Brouwer and Paulesc 2017; Blaagaard 2018). This article does exactly that: Illustrating the postcolonial, hybrid, and cosmopolitan qualities of digital activism on social media platforms, the article presents a discursive analysis of Black Lives Matter Denmark (BLM-DK) as they operate on the social media platform Facebook. The group’s posts are dedicated to juridical and political struggles over discrimination and racial violence in Denmark and the United States, thus producing a counterpublic. The posts moreover introduce and connect two very different geopolitical and historical contexts, thus showing social media’s potential for creating rhizomatic relations.

itizen Journalism as Conceptual Practice provides a conceptualization of citizen journalism as a political practice developed through analyses of an historical and postcolonial case. Arguing that citizen journalism is first and foremost situated, embodied and political rather than networked and technology-based, the book offers a grounded analysis of the colonial newspaper, The Herald, published in St. Croix (Virgin Islands) 1915-25 by a descendant of enslaved people and independently of the colonial ruler, Denmark.The analysis is informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to knowledge production and formulates a critical reading of citizens’ and subjects’ mediated political engagements then as well as now. The book discusses current approaches to citizen journalism before turning to The Herald, which is then read against the grain in an attempt to show the embodied politics of colonial history and cultural forms of citizen engagement as these politics evolve in this particular case of journalism

Citizen Media and Public Spaces presents a pioneering exploration of citizen media as a highly interdisciplinary domain that raises vital political, social and ethical issues relating to conceptions of citizenship and state boundaries, the construction of publics and social imaginaries, processes of co-optation and reverse co-optation, power and resistance, the ethics of witnessing and solidarity, and novel responses to the democratic deficit. Framed by a substantial introduction by the editors, the twelve contributions to the volume interrogate the concept of citizen media theoretically and empirically, and offer detailed case studies that extend from the UK to Russia and Bulgaria and from China to Denmark and the liminal spaces within which a growing number of refugees now live. A rich new domain of scholarship and practice emerges out of the studies presented. Citizen media is shown to embrace both physical and digital interventions in public space, as well as the sets of values and agendas that influence and drive the practices and discourses through which individuals and collectives position themselves within and in relation to society and participate in the creation of diverse publics. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in media and communication studies, particularly those studying citizen media, media and society, journalism and society, and political communication.

This chapter explores some of the ways in which cinema as a medium can offer possibilities for civic action and political transformations. It proposes in particular an analysis that foregrounds the relationship between postcolonial cinema and citizen media as a way of articulating active participation that manages not only to transform public space but also to propose alternative visual registers. Postcolonial cinema, I argue, contests mainstream and dominant visual registers that propose stereotypical or biased representations of the Other, undoing tropes of mastery and control by offering, or opening up, the space for different voices and viewpoints. The argument is developed through an analysis of Mare Chiuso (Closed Sea, Italy, 2012), a documentary film by Andrea Segre and Stefano Liberti, focusing in particular on the video footage produced by the refugees themselves during the Italian push-back operations in the Mediterranean, which features in the film. Interpreted as an example of citizen media, the miraculously saved video footage becomes a symbol for self-representation as well as political self-determination.

Among the increasing number of publicly exhibited works of art that have become accused of blasphemy or sacrilege in the context of cultural identity politics in Western societies, religiously connoted feminist art works and performances seem to stand out and to fulfil a particularly provocative role. The concerned works of art have remarkable common traits in their disputed imagery. They connect almost palpable and often naked human bodies to iconic sacred scenes of Western Christian culture and art, such as the suffering Jesus Christ on the cross, the Last Supper, the Virgin Mary with the child Jesus, or the Pietà (Mater Dolorosa). Well known examples are works such as Ecce Homo by Elisabeth Ohlson (Sweden), I.N.R.I. by Serge Bramly and Bettina Rheims (France), Yo Mama’s Last Supper by Renée Cox (USA), Our Lady by Alma López (USA), The Blood Ties by Katarzyna Kozyra (Poland), and Passion by Dorota Nieznalska (Poland). More recently, also songs and acts consisting of social, political, and religious critique, performed ‘provocatively’ by pop and punk artists such as Madonna, Lady Gaga, and the Russian formation Pussy Riot, have become publicly contested for comparable reasons. All these works of visual or performative art have been accused — more or less formally — of blasphemy or sacrilege, which contributed to both their notoriety and their controversiality by causing huge media attention.

In the past few years continental Europe has experienced a resurgence of right-wing party politics, nationalism and xenophobia. In this nationalist revival the media and advanced communications technologies have played a significant role, as evidenced by the debates following cases such as the Danish cartoon controversy, and Dutch politician Geert Wilders’s film, Fitna. Simultaneously, however, the media is more diverse and rhizomatic than ever and offers potential for cosmopolitanism, transnational ethical relations as well as radical anti-racist and anti-fascist interventions. This article explores the tensions within the relation between journalistic practice and the construction of theidea of the nation and the multiplicity of media and cultures which inhabit the spheres of journalism and nation.

This dissertation is focused on the journalistically practiced and mediated self-other relation in the contemporary cultural and postcolonial context of Denmark. As part of the ‘western’ world Denmark’s journalistic endeavours and explorations reflect and engage the cultural memory and thus the hegemonic self-image, the social imaginary, of the country and to some extent of its ‘western’ neighbours. Positioning myself in a European tradition of what may be called philosophies of experience – that is, philosophies that place emphasis on the embodiment of knowledge and the subjectivity of experience – I pay particular attention to the practice and production, in Raymond William’s use of the word, of journalistic participation in re- and de-constructing cultural memories and feelings of national, cultural, ethnic and religious belonging. The dissertation sets up a theoretical framework of references by presenting a number of debates that challenge the claimed universality and objectivity of white ‘western’ culture and politics. This critique emerge from African-American scholars and ‘white’ feminists alike, however the two have difficulties combining their respective positions and knowledge claims. Moreover, African-American women have called for recognition of the particularities of their situation of belonging to both categories. I employ a post-phenomenological approach to develop a theoretical framework which is based on the argument that though perception is at the core of a phenomenological approach to difference, perception should not be understood as interchangeable with visualisation. It is rather an understanding that creates strong ties to consciousness and experience. Drawing in the whole of personal experience and consciousness of difference phenomenology presents a theory of the self-other relation which is simultaneously personal and political. Secondly, the dissertation relates the phenomenological ‘race’ and gender debates to the societal and productive context of contemporary European and ‘western’ globalised and mediated culture and politics. Journalism is re-defined as theory and practice of production of cultural memory and social imaginaries of gendered, ethnic, religious, national and ‘racial’ differences. At the core of the argument here is a critique of the journalistic use of ‘objectivity’. This use hides the journalistic subjectivity by splitting the ethical accountability and relation from journalistic training and practices whereby a ‘white’ and homogeneous social imaginary is reproduced. I make a call for thinking about journalism as relation – in terms of technological mediations, but also in terms of subjectivities. In order to allow for this, a shift is needed in the understanding of an ‘us’ that forges a view of identity redefined in terms of intensities (Braidotti 2006), an ethics of difference (de Beauvoir 1976; Braidotti 2006) and a non-reductionist understanding of the other as part of the self (Glissant 1997). Following this framework the dissertation reworks ideas of cosmopolitanism from universal reproductions of sameness into creative productions of singular self-other relations based on the practiced and productive journalism. This is substantiated through case study analyses. The aim is to challenge the modern, rational journalistic subject referring back to the unified nation-state citizens. It is an undoing of journalism – a journalism as becoming and as excess of relation.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media sets out to chart the territory of citizen media, a new, fast evolving disciplinary terrain. Citizen media is understood in the context of this project as the physical artefacts, digital content, performative interventions, practices and discursive formations of affective sociality that ordinary citizens produce as they participate in public life to effect aesthetic or socio-political change. Pursuing an inclusive agenda, this understanding of citizen media encompasses such diverse forms of political and aesthetic intervention in public life as graffiti and other forms of street art, street performance, community theatre, rap and hip hop, community radio, citizen journalism, citizen photography, blogging, tweeting, documentary film making, hacktivism, fansubbing, and scanlation. As such it allows engagement with participatory cultures across the entire spectrum of a population, irrespective of their level of access to digital media. Citizen Media and Performance Studies Maria Chatzichristodoulou, London South Bank University, UK This entry will examine a diverse range of performance practices that are, in some way, related to the notion of citizen media. As the connections between the two are emergent – and thus, to some extent, in the making – the entry will be led by current practice, adopting an empirical approach in the first instance. It will start by surveying contemporary performances that unfold within, intervene in or disrupt the public sphere, whether this is physical or digital. These could be street performances, activist/citizen actions, cyber-activist events, performance interventions, public forms of docu-dramas, performative gestures that disrupt quotidian happenings, and so on. It will then attempt to differentiate – to the extent this is possible and desirable – between performance as an artistic (and activist) practice, and performative action as a methodological approach in the service of a political end; or what journalist Paul Mason has described as ‘gestural politics’ (2012: 1). To achieve that, the entry will apply key scholarly work; most notably Richard Schechner’s performance studies approach (2002, 2006), Austin’s theory of the performative utterance (1962), the notion of the performative turn, the idea of theatricality in relation to gesture and protest (Hughes and Parry 2015), and the concept of the experience economy (Pine II and Gilmore 1998).

This entry examines citizen media from the perspective of conflict and humanitarian studies, informed by the interdisciplinary framework of cultural studies, to provide an overview of contemporary critical debates on conflict, media and society. Historically, the dominance of war-centric approaches has confined our understanding of conflict to its negative and violent forms. In these contexts, interventions focused primarily on prevention and elite peace-making, thus overshadowing the structural and cultural drivers of conflict omnipresent in society due to power inequalities and injustices. For decades, particularly as enshrined in the works of the conflict transformation school, attention shifted from this minimalist view to a maximalist one that recognizes the constructive potential of conflict for social change processes, and sees conflict and peace along a continuum, where peace becomes a praxis, as reflected in the continuous, society-wide struggles for democracy, equality, and justice. Against this background, the entry will first survey key scholarly work on media, conflict and peace, and provide a brief overview of the (destructive and constructive) functions that media may serve in conflicts and reconciliation. Following a non media-centric approach, it will then examine citizen media in relation to conflict transformation, with the facilities they provide for self-representation and empowerment from micro (individual) to macro (societal) levels. The focus of inquiry will be on the emancipatory potential of citizen media and the democratic-pluralist expressions they enable by, among and through citizens in a variety of forms; organized and non-organized, physical or digital, individual or collective. Finally, the entry will review recent case studies of community-based media initiatives in the ethno-politically divided island of Cyprus, to better illustrate the different functions citizen media may serve in conflict contexts.

This entry examines the etymology of ‘crowdsourcing’, a term coined in 2005 by Wired editor Jeff Howe, and defines the term as set out by Estellés-Arolas and González Ladrón-de-Guevara (2012). Drawing on Brabham’s work (2013), it delivers an overview of crowdsourcing, -funding in entrepreneurship, science, technology and government, referring to projects such as Kickstarter, Topcoder and Citizenlab. The focus then turns to the different ways in which cultural, creative and activist communities have interpreted crowdsourced practice. For the purposes of illustration, various recent cultural crowdsourcing initiatives – including UCL’s Transcribe Bentham, the Imperial War Museum’s Lives of the First World War, Brooklyn Museum’s Freeze Tag, Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk’s This Exquisite Forest, Shift’s Historypin and Jonathan Harris’ Cowbird, as well as activist initiatives including Sukey and Actipedia – are introduced. Examples of crowdfunding initiatives will include projects at the British Library and the British Museum/UCL’s Micropasts. The entry will contextualise projects within New Capitalism as a Neoliberal form of Late Biopower. Attention will be drawn to leadership, sovereignty and regulation within crowdsourcing and links between information circulation and hegemonic power. Crowdsourcing will be distinguished from co-creation and the commons as defined by Scholz (2016) and Bollier (2016), and related to Baker and Blaagaard’s definition of citizen media (2016).