Talk on community media and entanglement

The starting point for the presentation was 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 strengthened 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.

The video of Nico Carpentier’s talk can be watched at the Umeå University HUMlab Seminar Archive: The community media assemblage – community media theory through the lens of the discursive-material knot

Nico Carpentier, professor in media and communication studies at the Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University.