Advancing Voicing: Agency, Collectivities, and Potentialities of Engaging Complex Problems Amidst Deep Mediatization

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Proposal

Abstract

Aims of this roundtable session are to illuminate civil society and media activism via Couldry and Hepp’s ‘deep mediatization’ [DM] thesis, presented in their recent book - The Mediated Construction of Reality (Polity 2017). Authors claim that DM infuses every aspect of life in today’s mediated digital reality, and hence is implicated in power-relations controlling media technologies, infrastructures (p.7). Overall, then, the authors argue that the very nature of social order changes under DM, and so too transformations of collectivities’ formation and organizing efforts.

Notably, for our discussion of potentialities of grassroots change efforts amidst DM, Couldry and Hepp distinguish between ‘media-based’ and ‘mediatized’ collectivities’: While media-based collectivities remain organized on principles not fundamentally different from before digital media, principles of collective organization amidst ‘mediatized collectivities’ are transformed by ways media resources interconnect to create new possibilities of organization, identify formations, dynamics of collectivities’ co-existence. This has major implications for individuals and civil society-based organizing.

For their part, the engaged media scholars will assess their social change efforts that aim, among other things, to: advance voicing/agency and collective engagement, share knowledge, contribute to deeper understanding and social justice amidst DM.

Our session will begin with overviews by the authors of their theses and discussants’ community-based projects (see bios in Rationale). Majority of session will evolve as facilitated dialogue among all panelists, and audience members, starting with potential questions (below).

Engaged scholars/discussants will relate to questions by drawing on their experiences engaging complex problems (e.g. environmental injustice and river mismanagement, police-judicial discrimination, poverty, sexual exploitation, white racial hegemony) in order to assess potentialities, problems, and impacts of advancing ground-up social change efforts involving local media production amidst DM.

OVERARCHING QUESTIONS:
1) What are the problems, potentialities, and impacts of organizing for change in the mediatized digital age?

2) Has our discussion enhanced the authors' materialist phenomenological theorizing project?

SECONDARY/ACCESS QUESTIONS:
1) What evidence, consequences, and assessments can we provide for emergence of ‘mediatized’ versus ‘media-based’ collectivities?

2) Locally, given “deep mediatization” of everyday life, are community organizing, local media production, and “makers movements” amplifying local voices and narratives, reclaiming local time and space, impacting local manifestations of complex problems, building resilient communities of practice?

3) Globally, in terms of power relations, what evidence do we have that multiple communities’ ground-up organizing and media efforts can impact complex global problems, and challenges such as continuation of inherited hegemonic systems and global corporatization?

Sub Unit

• Philosophy, Theory and Critique

Respondents

• Nick Couldry, London School of Economics & Political Science

• Andreas Hepp, U of Bremen - ZeMKI

• Jessica Wendorf Muhamad, Florida State U

• Andy Opel, Florida State U

• Khadijah White, Rutgers U

• Todd Wolfson, Rutgers SC&I

• Peter S Lemish, Independent Scholar