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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.

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.

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.