Roots, Currents and Horizons: A Conceptual Journey into the Media Practice Approach

Event details

Speaker: Dr Emiliano Trere, Cardiff University

This talk is based on the reflections developed together with Hilde Stephansen in the introductory chapter of Citizen Media and Practice (Stephansen and Treré, 2019), a recent collection published by Routledge that critically interrogates the significance of the concept of media practices for the study of citizen and activist media. In this SATSU Seminar, my aim is to illuminate the past, assess the present and discuss the future of a media practice approach with a specific focus on citizen and activist media. I start grounding the roots of this approach in the richness of Latin American communication and media studies, and then I critically chart the diverse currents of research on media practices. I examine the strengths and limitations of this approach in the understanding and theorising of citizen and activist media, and subsequently address its fruitful integration with other conceptual lenses (media ecologies, mediation, media archaeology, etc.). I conclude reflecting on how this approach can shed light on the pressing challenges posed by datafication and I underline its main limitations and future opportunities.