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Mediatization and Populism: Understanding the Interplay Between Media, Culture, and Politics

Sun, May 28, 14:00 to 15:15, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 3, Aqua Salon F

Abstract

The study of mediatization processes has received interest from very different strands of media and communication studies as well as from other disciplines and several overviews of this emerging field of research have tried to distinguish between for instance institutional, cultural, or materialist approaches and the different conceptualizations of mediatization following these approaches (e.g. Lundby, 2014). Such typologies may be useful for mapping the different intellectual starting points of various researchers moving into the new field but they may be of little help to actually develop the study of mediatization. These typologies tend to map existing theoretical entrenchments from the social sciences and humanities onto the new field and thereby overlook both the possible affinities of different approaches and the need for dialogue across theoretical frameworks and disciplines for understanding the growing interplay between media, culture, and society.
In this paper I will discuss the interplay between media, culture, and politics in current mediatization processes using the rise of populist politics in immigration issues as an illustrative case study. In order to understand how various media dynamics are implicated in the emergence of populist politics we need to be able to address how both cultural, material, and institutional dimensions may fit in a holistic model of mediatization. Existing approaches to the analysis of mediatized politics provide useful concepts about the reciprocal adaptation between news media logics and political logics but we also need to conceptualize how cultural dimensions of populist politics are amplified, framed, and co-structured (Hjarvard et al., 2015). by other forms of media, not only news media. Conceptually speaking, we need to address how the ‘cultural’ fits together with the ‘institutional’ in both politics and the media.
References
Hjarvard, S., Mortensen, M., and Eskjær, M. (2015). “Three Dynamics of Mediatized Conflicts”, in Eskjær, M. et al.: The Dynamics of Mediatized Conflicts, New York: Peter Lang.
Lundby, K. (2014). ‘Mediatization of Communication, In K. Lundby (ed.) Mediatization of Communication, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 3-38.

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