Anthropology of Media

In this paper we argue that the use of the communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an understanding of how power shapes planning. We posit an alternative approach based on the power analytics of Michel Foucault which focuses on ‘what is actually done’, as opposed to Habermas’s focus on ‘what should be done’. We discuss how the Foucauldian stance problematises planning, asking difficult questions about the treatment of legitimacy, rationality, knowledge and spatiality. We conclude that Foucault offers a type of analytic planning theory which offers better prospects than does Habermas for those interested in understanding and bringing about democratic social change through planning.

At the same time that case studies are widely used and have produced canonical texts, it may be observed that the case study as a methodology is generally held in low regard, or is simply ignored, within the academy. For example, only 2 of the 30 top-ranked U.S. graduate programs in political science require a dedicated graduate course in case study or qualitative methods, and a full third of these programs do not even offer such a course. In contrast, all of the top 30 programs offer courses in quantitative methods and almost all of them require training in such methods, often several courses. In identifying this paradox of the case study’s wide use and low regard, Gerring rightly remarks that the case study survives in a “curious methodological limbo,” and that the reason is that the method is poorly understood. In what follows, we will try to resolve Gerring’s paradox and help case study research gain wider use and acceptance.

During the onslaught of the Islamic caliphate on Kobanî, Syria, media outlets across the globe broadcast pictures of brave and often unveiled Kurdish women fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a quintessentially male force of destruction. The images of women fighting Islamist male aggressors aroused outrage, admiration, and pity among observers. But had all Kurdish fighters been male or had women fought for ISIS, viewers might have reacted differently. To examine some of the most widely disseminated gendered pictures and videos of the Syrian uprising in the media, this article draws on Mohja Kahf’s three categories, which typify how Muslim women, Arab women, or both are perceived by the Anglophone reading and viewing public: the first is victims; the second, escapees; and the third, pawns of patriarchy and male power. While this typology helps in examining gendered images of the Syrian uprising, it also obscures the socioeconomic realities on the ground.

Back cover text: If the new fin de siècle marks a recurrence of the real, Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power epitomizes that development and sets new standards for social and political inquiry. The Danish town of Aalborg is to Flyvbjerg what Florence was to Machiavelli: a laboratory for understanding the real workings of power, and for grasping what they mean to our more general concerns of social and political organization. Politics, administration, and planning are examined in ways that allow  a rare, in-depth understanding. The reader witnesses, firsthand, the classic and endless drama which defines what modernity and democracy are and can be.

Taken together, the works of Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault highlight an essential tension in modernity. This is the tension between the normative and the real, between what should be done and what is actually done. Understanding this tension is crucial to understanding modern democracy, what it is and what it could be. It has been argued that an effective way of making democracy stronger is to strengthen civil society. This article contains a comparative analysis of the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to the question of democracy and civil society. More specifically, the discourse ethics of Habermas is contrasted with the power analytics and ethics of Foucault evaluating their usefulness for those interested in understanding, and bringing about, democratic social change.

Back cover text: Real Social Science presents a new, hands-on approach to social inquiry. The theoretical and methodological ideas behind the book, inspired by Aristotelian phronesis, represent an original perspective within the social sciences, and this volume gives readers for the first time a set of studies exemplifying what applied phronesis looks like in practice. The reflexive analysis of values and power gives new meaning to the impact of research on policy and practice. Real Social Science is a major step forward in a novel and thriving field of research. This book will benefit scholars, researchers, and students who want to make a difference in practice, not just in the academy. Its message will make it essential reading for students and academics across the social sciences.

Vaclav Havel observed that a strong civil society is a crucial condition of strong democracy. Empowering civil society is a central concern for the project of democracy, just as the question of how best to think about such empowerment is important to social and political theory. But what is ‘civil society’? A search for clear definitions in the relevant literature is in vain. Not because the concept lacks definitions; rather the definitions are too multiple and varied to bring clarity. Most writers on civil society agree, however, that civil society has an institutional core constituted by voluntary associations outside the sphere of the state and the economy. Such associations range from, for example, churches, cultural associations, sport clubs and debating societies to independent media, academies, groups of concerned citizens, grass-roots initiatives and organizations of gender, race and sexuality, all the way to occupational associations, political parties and labour unions (Habermas 1992a: 453).

The question of how and why people adopt technologies is an area that has received great scrutiny, but less attention is given to those who willingly choose to avoid particular technologies. This article considers current models of technology adoption and explores how technology influences us as a society and individually, paying special attention to how large-scale shifts in technological change come to bear on individuals who choose not to adopt specific technologies. By combining scholarship in the information sciences with observations from media ecology theorists, this article proposes a more nuanced view of technology adoption and resistance.

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

Since the early 2000s, Ethiopia has witnessed the rapid growth of a local digital film industry whose economic model is similar to the one adopted by other industries of this kind emerged in African countries such as Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. Films are shot in digital format, are independently funded and commercially-driven, use Amharic as main language and target local and diasporic audiences. Unlike other productions of this kind around the continent, however, Ethiopian video films are firstly released in the large cinema theatres that characterize Addis Ababa’s urban landscape, and later circulate via VCDs, in Ethiopia, and in internet, throughout the diaspora. Within a context defined by a relatively tight governmental control on media production and circulation, the emergence of this phenomenon is introducing important transformations, and modifying the way locally-produced media are perceived and consumed within the Ethiopian public sphere. While being commercially oriented, in fact, videos do produce a social and moral commentary which portrays, and in some cases criticizes, the way the society has transformed over the past few years.

This article provides an answer to what has been called the biggest problem in theorizing and understanding planning: the ambivalence about power found among planning researchers, theorists, and students. The author narrates how he came to work with issues of power and gives an example of how the methodology he developed for power studies—phronetic planning research—may be employed in practice. Phronetic planning research follows the tradition of power studies running from Machiavelli and Nietzsche to Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. It focuses on four value-rational questions: (1) Where are we going with planning? (2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? (3) Is this development desirable? (4) What should be done? These questions are exemplified for a specific instance of Scandinavian urban planning. The author finds that the questions, and their answers, make a difference to planning in practice. They make planning research matter.

There is ferment in the social sciences. After years of sustained effort to build a science of society modelled on the natural sciences, that project, long treated with suspicion by some, is now openly being rethought. A critical intervention in this period of reflection was Making Social Science Matter (MSSM) by Bent Flyvbjerg, published in 2001. In that book Flyvbjerg challenged the very idea of social science as a science modelled on the natural sciences. Flyvbjerg argued that, as the social sciences study human interactions that involve human consciousness, volition, power and reflexivity, attempts to build generalizable, predictive models such as those for the natural world are misplaced and even futile.

Back cover text: Making Social Science Matter presents an exciting new approach to social science, including theoretical argument, methodological guidelines, and examples of practical application. Why has social science failed in attempts to emulate natural science and produce normal theory? Bent Flyvbjerg argues that the strength of social science is in its rich, reflexive analysis of values and power, essential to the social and economic development of any society. Richly informed, powerfully argued, and clearly written, this book provides essential reading for all those in the social and behavioral sciences.

This book maps a hundred years of documentary film practices in India. It demonstrates that in order to study the development of a film practice, it is necessary to go beyond the classic analysis of films and filmmakers and focus on the discourses created around and about the practice in question. The book navigates different historical moments of the growth of documentary filmmaking in India from the colonial period to the present day. In the process, it touches upon questions concerning practices and discourses about colonial films, postcolonial institutions, independent films, filmmakers and filmmaking, the influence of feminism and the articulation of concepts of performance and performativity in various films practices. It also reflects on the centrality of technological change in different historical moments and that of film festivals and film screenings across time and space.

For over fifty years, successive waves of critique have underscored that the apolitical character of much of Political Science research betrays the founding mission of the discipline to have science serve democracy. The Caucus for a New Political Science was originally based on such a critique, and the Perestroika movement in the discipline included a call for more problem-driven as opposed to theory- or method-driven work that would better connect Political Science research to ongoing political struggles. In recent years, movements for a public Sociology and public Anthropology as well as dissonant movements in Economics and related fields have added to the insistence that social science research was too often disconnected from the real world. Phronetic Social Science has emerged out of the ferment for change in the social sciences, starting with the much-debated book by Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge 2001). Flyvbjerg critiqued the social sciences for mimicking the natural sciences while proposing an alternative approach that focuses research on helping people address the problems they are facing in the context they are facing them. Today, Phronetic Social Science goes beyond the call for an alternative approach to social inquiry and its growing adherents are providing evidence that this alternative approach to doing research can enrich the social sciences by more effectively connecting research to efforts to address real world problems as people experience them. This essay provides a genealogy of efforts to connect Political Science to politics, a review of the major critiques of mainstream research, an explication of the rationale for more problem-driven, mixed methods research, a specification of the key principles of the phronetic approach, and examples of its application in the public realm. The essay concludes with implications for realizing a more political Political Science by way of taking a phronetic approach.

Se la musica non detta immediatamente gli atti che la devono segui-re, da quell'orientamento che essa dà alla catarsi dell'animo dipende anche quali forze arrecherà alla vita, che cosa libererà e che cosa respingerà nel profondo. L'arte, più che altro, è un'organizzazione del nostro comportamento in vista del futuro, [...] che ci costringe a protenderci al di sopra della nostra vita reale, verso quello che giace al di là. (L. S. Vygotskij, Psicologia dell'arte, 1925, p. 344) È assai ingenuo dare al termine "sociale" il senso di "collettivo", quello cioè della presenza di una moltitudine di persone. La so-cialità è anche là dove c'è un uomo solo, con le sue personali vi-cissitudini interiori. […] Le cose non vanno davvero secondo il modello immaginato dalla teoria del contagio, per cui il sentimen-to sorto in un individuo contagerebbe gli altri e diventerebbe sociale […] (L. S. Vygotskij, Psicologia dell'arte, 1925, p. 339) La sottomissione alla regola e la rinuncia ad agire secondo un impulso immediato è il cammino verso il massimo piacere. Un carattere essenziale del gioco è quindi la regola divenuta affet-to. «L'idea divenuta affetto, il concetto trasformatosi in passione» è il prototipo di questo ideale di Spinoza nel gioco, regno della spontaneità e della libertà […]

Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen coined the term ‘supernormal stimulus’ after discovering that birds who lay small, pale blue eggs speckled with grey prefer to sit on larger, bright blue eggs with black polka-dots. He found that he could exaggerate the key qualities of any natural stimulus to produce a stronger reaction yet--be it nurturance, courtship, fear or aggression.
    Animals encounter supernormal stimuli mostly when experimenters build them.  Humans can generate their own and media are awash with them: friendly smiling faces more consistently welcoming than ones own friends, animated cartoon characters with wider eyes than any real child’s, seductive bodies exceeding any proportions found in nature, and a huge array of supernatural menaces.
    This chapter examines film, television, spectator sports, video games, and social websites as well as more traditional media such as print and musical performance in terms of the concept of supernormal stimuli.

The Aalborg Project may be interpreted as a metaphor of modern politics, modern administration and planning, and of modernity itself. The basic idea of the project was comprehensive, coherent, and innovative, and it was based on rational and democratic argument. During implementation, however, when idea met reality, the play of Machiavellian princes, Nietzschean will to power, and Foucauldian rationality-as-rationalization resulted in the fragmentation of the project.

If we want to empower and re-enchant organization research, we need to do three things. First, we must drop all pretence, however indirect, at emulating the success of the natural sciences in producing cumulative and predictive theory, for their approach simply  does not work in organization research or any of  the social sciences (for the full argument, see Flyvbjerg 2001). Second, we must address problems that matter to groups in the local, national, and global communities in which we live, and we must do it in ways that matter; we must focus on issues of context, values, and power, as advocated by great social scientists from Aristotle and Machiavelli  to Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu. Finally, we must effectively and dialogically communicate the results of our research to our fellow citizens and carefully listen to their feedback. If we do this – focus on specific values and interests in the context of particular power relations – we may successfully transform organization research into an activity performed in public for organizational publics, sometimes to clarify, sometimes to intervene, sometimes to generate new perspectives, and always to serve as eyes and ears in ongoing efforts to understand the present and to deliberate about the future. We may, in short, arrive at organization research that matters.

Turkey has witnessed a proliferation of Islamic television channels since the liberalization of broadcasting in the 1990s. The programming of these TV channels was initially distinctly theological in character, with shows focusing on the doctrinal, scriptural, and ritualistic aspects of Islam. More recently, however, they have started producing family-friendly entertainment programs as well as shows aimed at “strengthening the family.” Islamic broadcasters intend their family-focused programming as civil initiatives against what they see as the increasing corrosion of the “moral fabric of the family” and devaluation of “family values” in contemporary Turkish society. In these TV shows, audiences are provided with guidance and techniques that would help them cultivate ethical dispositions, knowledge, and skills so that they could assume autonomy and responsibility for administering their families more effectively. Islamic broadcasters explicitly identify their role as assisting the state in  fighting social problems through their programming. Moreover, the discourses and sensibilities promoted on television articulate with the biopolitical concerns of the nation-state and the emerging rationalities of governance. While Islamic television professionals’ self-ascribed mission to “strengthen the family” emerges from a religiously inspired moral imperative to provide service, it simultaneously indicates their internalization of neoliberal rationalities of governance that promote the responsibilization of non-governmental actors for providing social services as well as that of individuals for supporting and caring for their family members. [Keywords: Islam, television, media, family, family values, secularism, neoliberalism, Turkey]

You can download the paper at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/670934

Phronetic organizational research is an approach to the study of management and organizations focusing on ethics and power. It is based on a contemporary interpretation of the Aristotelian concept phronesis, usually as ‘prudence’. Phronesis is the ability to think and act in relation to values, to deliberate about ‘things that are good or bad for humans’ in the words of Aristotle (1976:1140a24–b12). Phronetic organizational research effectively provides answers to the following four value-rational questions, for specific problematics in management and organization studies: 1. Where are we going with this specific management problematic? 2. Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? 3. Is this development desirable? 4. What, if anything, should we do about it?

Jazz was born on the streets, grew up in the clubs, and will die—so some fear—at the university. Facing dwindling commercial demand and the gradual disappearance of venues, many aspiring jazz musicians today learn their craft, and find their careers, in one of the many academic programs that now offer jazz degrees. School for Cool is their story. Going inside the halls of two of the most prestigious jazz schools around—at Berklee College of Music in Boston and the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York—Eitan Y. Wilf tackles a formidable question at the heart of jazz today: can creativity survive institutionalization?

Few art forms epitomize the anti-institutional image more than jazz, but it’s precisely at the academy where jazz is now flourishing. This shift has introduced numerous challenges and contradictions to the music’s practitioners. Solos are transcribed, technique is standardized, and the whole endeavor is plastered with the label “high art”—a far cry from its freewheeling days. Wilf shows how students, educators, and administrators have attempted to meet these challenges with an inventive spirit and a robust drive to preserve—and foster—what they consider to be jazz’s central attributes: its charisma and unexpectedness. He also highlights the unintended consequences of their efforts to do so. Ultimately, he argues, the gap between creative practice and institutionalized schooling, although real, is often the product of our efforts to close it.

This article asks how planning scholarship may effectively gain impact in planning practice through media exposure. In liberal democracies, the public sphere is dominated by mass media. Therefore, working with such media is a prerequisite for effective public impact of planning research. Using the example of megaproject planning, it is illustrated how so-called “phronetic planning research,” which explicitly incorporates in its methodology active and strategic collaboration with media, may be helpful in generating change in planning practice via the public sphere. Main lessons learned are as follows: (1) working with mass media is an extremely cost-effective way to increase the impact of planning scholarship on practice; (2) recent developments in information technology and social media have made impact via mass media even more effective; (3) research on “tension points,” that is, points of potential conflict, are particularly interesting to media and the public, and are especially likely to generate change in practice; and (4) tension points bite back; planning researchers should be prepared for, but not afraid of, this.

La nostra quotidianità tecnologica, sempre più pervasiva, tende a modificare gradualmente non solo le abitudini e i comportamenti della collettività ma anche a influenzarne i modelli di pensiero di riferimento. Questa immensa semiosfera mediale sembra così esplicitare la propria natura ambivalente, ambigua, rispecchiando di fatto le potenzialità d’essere costituite dalla virtualità: d’altra parte, per fare un esempio, con l’iperconnessione l’utente è sia online sia fisicamente situato in uno spazio. L’uomo tecnologico – che grazie a questa ambivalenza è spesso protagonista anche di esistenze online (o di frammenti esistenziali) e che manifesta la propria presenza con l’attività sulla rete – sembra tramutarsi gradualmente in un mediantropo, ossia in un essere che, partecipando attivamente alla società di cui è parte, co-costruisce e co-percepisce servendosi del segno grafico, contribuendo alla potenziale crescita del contesto di cui è abitante.
Partendo anche da alcune esemplificazioni, appare importante indagare intanto la natura della scrittura sul web, cioè della traccia che il mediantropo produce con la propria azione: da un lato, essa si presenta come una sorta di weboralità enunciativa, istantanea e volatile (come dimostrano per esempio Snapchat e altre applicazioni di IM a tempo); dall’altro, proprio per la costante natura ambigua, essa è un segno ideogrammatico e pittografico che traduce in immagini sensazioni, emozioni, gesti e che, basandosi su una semplificata retorica digitale, coinvolge coloro che assistono allo spettacolo quotidiano della rete.
Nello spazio dei social media, in cui il racconto è lo strumento privilegiato per la narrazione del sé quotidiano e dunque per l’ipotetica costruzione di senso, il mediantropo è colui che è soggetto e contemporaneamente oggetto del medium; è uno spettatore-attore di se stesso, in un particolare fenomeno di riflessione che rischia di assumere anche un andamento autoreferenziale e simulacrale. I modelli comunicativi dei media paiono consolidare questa costruzione in parte a-significativa dell’immagine (nel senso platonico del termine), cioè come rimando ridondante a un caos valoriale che sembra riguardare anche taluni aspetti identitari. Tuttavia, per parte opposta e per naturale ambivalenza del contesto, affiora la consapevolezza di poter creare e compartecipare anche a istanze semiologicamente efficaci ed effettivamente funzionali per la collettività, come dimostrano i numerosi risultati ottenuti dall’intelligenza collettiva. La co-costruzione è altresì spesso un’esaltazione della condizione di intenzionalità collettiva (o plurale?) che si manifesta anche nella cosiddetta peer-production, ossia nel prodotto risultato di un’azione condivisa, tendenzialmente emergente e non-lineare. Saremmo dunque al cospetto di un sistema complesso, che appare come risultato di possibili rimodellizzazioni (anche identitarie) degli schematismi stessi del pensiero. 
In definitiva, alla luce di queste considerazioni, si tratta quindi di introdurre problematicamente la figura del mediantropo, analizzando brevemente come il ricorso al codice linguistico (nella dicotomica doppiezza di essere contemporaneamente atto eppure rappresentazione) possa essere elemento imprescindibile per l’avvio di azioni di co-costruzione significativa e, al tempo stesso, di una comunicazione identitaria e iconica in grado di attrarre emotivamente e di catalizzare l’interesse e l’attenzione dei propri fruitori.
L’indagine verrà condotta partendo da studi di natura filosofica, linguistica e di filosofia del linguaggio per quanto riguarda gli aspetti esistenziali, fenomenologici e dell’azione; si farà riferimento inoltre al punto di vista semiologico (per quanto riguarda il concetto di immagine e di costruzione della significazione), a quello antropologico, per la questione identitaria, e a taluni aspetti di natura neuroscientifica per la parte riguardante la modificazione del modo di pensare e il coinvolgimento emotivo provocato dall’azione collettiva.

The growing popularity of new social and participatory media at a time of global turbulence raises challenging questions for anthropologists wishing to engage with publics beyond academia. In this chapter I draw from my experience as a media anthropologist researching activism and social protest to explore some of these challenges. I argue that an updated public anthropology is required if we are to reach out beyond the mass media channels familiar from previous decades. The new digital media environment is a ‘hybrid’ system made up of old and new technologies, actors and practices interacting in contingent ways (Chadwick 2011) as well as a domain of cultural production mired in a deep political and economic crisis. This situation demands open-ended, idiosyncratic, and collaborative approaches to public engagement that take into account both the unique affordances of today’s digital technologies and the aftereffects of the 2011 and 2013 waves of social protest around the globe. I exemplify this argument through my experience with four distinct platforms, namely a mailing list, a research blog, Twitter and Facebook, in a range of public contexts.

The term ‘phronetic social science’ was coined in Making Social Science Matter (Flyvbjerg 2001). However, as pointed out in that volume and by Schram (2006), phronetic social science existed well before this particular articulation of the concept, but it was just not organized, recognized or named as such. Rather, it occurred here and there as scholars had adopted phronesis-like methods for their own purposes. The present title is the first organized volume of empirical–practical work in phronetic social science. Before Making Social Science Matter, phronesis, as a critical term of Aristotelian philosophy, had been theorized and its continuing importance as a key concept in Western thought had been convincingly argued by distinguished philosophers like Hans Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard J. Bernstein, among others. But no one had developed the theory and philosophy of phronesis into a practical methodology that could be applied by researchers interested in actually practising a phronetic social science. Making Social Science Matter developed such a methodology. Its implications were discussed and developed further in Making Political Science Matter (Schram and Caterino 2006). After these two theoretical–methodological contributions, it was evident that an important next step in demonstrating the usefulness of phronetic social science would be to illustrate, with concrete examples, how applied phronesis works in practical, empirical social science research. The contributions on applied phronesis contained in the present volume make clear that this next step has now been taken.

Social media platforms have quickly transformed communication, relationships, identities, education and power relations. These platforms have also become a popular topic for discussion and research, yet most claims made about social media are very general. This course takes an anthropological approach to social media in order to speak about the ways social media use is embedded in and reflective of specific cultural contexts. The course concentrates on content of social media rather than platforms, and also explores social media as a research method for understanding how people's lives converge in both online and offline spaces. We will consider the incredible variation in social media that emerges on different continents, among people of different class and religious backgrounds, for people with different gender and sexual identities, and among people who are differently embedded in global systems. Course Objectives Students will be able to: 1. explain key terms that are central to an anthropological understanding of social media 2. relate social media to topics of cultural and social diversity 3. relate issues in the study of social media with power relations, ideology, and social institutions 4. think comparatively in terms of both universals of social media as well as local inflections 5. apply anthropological methods to their own project 6. apply key themes, theories, and approaches of anthropology to their own analysis

While conducting my research on the Nigerian video industry over the past few years, I often had the impression to fi nd myself in front of an object of study that implicitly resisted defi nition. While, on the one hand, one could say that all research object challenges and resists the researcher's attempt to classify and encapsulate it in theoretically coherent discourses, in the case of the Nigerian video industry I had the feeling that discursive practices were playing a particular role. Throughout my research I in fact observed a particular tension between the way the video industry was discussed and represented, both locally and internationally, and the way the industry itself was evolving and transforming over time.

With a point of departure in the concept "uncomfortable knowledge," this article presents a case study of how the American Planning Association (APA) deals with such knowledge. APA was found to actively suppress publicity of malpractice concerns and bad planning in order to sustain a boosterish image of planning. In the process, APA appeared to disregard and violate APA's own Code of Ethics. APA justified its actions with a need to protect APA members' interests, seen as preventing planning and planners from being presented in public in a bad light. The current article argues that it is in members' interest to have malpractice critiqued and reduced, and that this best happens by exposing malpractice, not by denying or diverting attention from it as APA did in this case. Professions, organizations, and societies that stifle critique tend to degenerate and become socially and politically irrelevant "zombie institutions." The article asks whether such degeneration has set in for APA and planning. Finally, it is concluded that more debate about APA's ethics and actions is needed for improving planning practice. Nine key questions are presented to constructively stimulate such debate.

This article seeks to build a digital ritual framework for the analysis of social gaming and social networking. The architectural design that intertwines Facebook and FarmVille is heightened by the formal and informal participation in ritual practices, which we theorize as digital rituals. Facebook and FarmVille provide a substantive case study that delves into the topical blurring of lines around the game space or magic circle. Through digital ethnographic methodologies the article identifies a number of digital ritual engagements that fit well with Grant McCracken's (1986) four different kinds of consumer rituals: exchange rituals, possession rituals, grooming rituals, and divestment rituals. Social gaming is contextualized as the extension of digital third places complicating distinctions between social network and social networking sites. Beyond simply phatic communication or decompression, FarmVille and Facebook through digital ritual participation are increasingly the manifestation of our networked interests, communities, and lives.

For quotation please refer to the articles published from the thesis :
- Part of chapter one can be found in: “Small screen cinema: Informality and remediation in Nollywood”. Journal of Television and New Media 13(5): 431 – 446
- A revised version of chapter two is published in: “Regulating mobility, reshaping accessibility: Nollywood and the piracy scapegoat”. In Staging the Immaterial: Rights, Style and Performance in Sub-Saharan Africa. Eds. M. Diawara and U. Röschenthaler. Oxford: Sean Kingston
- Part of chapter three is published in: “From Nollywood to Nollyworld: Processes of transnationalization in the Nigerian video film industry”. In Global Nollywood: Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry. Eds. M. Krings and O. Okome. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 25 – 45.
- Chapter four is published in: “When the Nigerian video film industry became “Nollywood”:  Naming, branding and the videos’ transnational mobility”. Estudos Afro-Asiátcos 33( 1/2/3):  225-251
- Chapter six is published in: “Nigerian videos in the global arena: The postcolonial exotic revisited”. In Global South 7(1): 157 – 178.
- Parts of chapter seven are published in two different articles: 
(a) “On the periphery of Nollywood: Nigerian video filmmaking in Italy and the emergence of intercultural aesthetics”. In Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity. Eds. C. Lombardi-Diop and C. Romeo. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 239 – 252.
(b) “Exporting Nollywood: Nigerian video filmmaking in Europe”. In Behind the Screen: European Contributions to Production Studies. Eds. P. Szczepanik and. Vonderau. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan

What makes media “Islamic”? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Islamic television producers in Cairo, this article looks at the passionate contention within Egypt’s piety movement over the development of new forms of religious media. I suggest that at stake in these mass-mediated debates over da‘wa (Islamic outreach) are conflicting theologies of mediation that configure the boundaries of the religious and the secular differently. This God-talk matters greatly to Islamic revivalists, who spend more time debunking each other than they do secularists. Attention to these internal critiques foregrounds the competing moral conceptions of human flourishing and divine obligation that animate Egypt’s Islamic Revival. Indeed, focusing on the piety movement’s internal fractures as God-talk allows for an ethnographic engagement with how Muslim adepts critique religious difference—and the difference that religious critique makes—beyond the imperatives of secular power. This focus, in turn, complicates the stakes of anthropological judgment.

In this article, I examine the ideologies surrounding the poetic forms of Giriama text messaging in the town of Malindi, Kenya. I argue that young people use rapid code-switching and a global medialect of condensed, abbreviated English as an iconic index of a modern, mobile, self-fashioning, sexy, and irreverent persona, whereas their use of the local vernacular (Kigiriama) tends to reroot them in the gravitas of social obligations and respect relationships. In text messages, then, English and local African tongues are sometimes treated as foils for each other, suggesting that, rather than merely being mimicked, the English medialect is flavored by distinctly local concerns. Indeed, among many Giriama elders, the poetic patterns of text messaging are construed as a special breed of witchery in which hypermobility and linguistic innovation threaten ethnic coherence and even sanity itself. I suggest, however, that the use of Kigiriama in text messaging may point not to the abandonment of ethnicity but to new ways of being Giriama that are simultaneously local and modern.

In this chapter we draw from recent ethnographic and archival research in Indonesia to explore how digital activists in that country translate or 'modulate' (Kelty 2008) key digital issues – which are sometimes highly technical and abstract – to reach diverse publics, often with remarkable success. We argue that Indonesia's digital activists have developed an effective pedagogical folksonomy in which three particular digital personas stand out, namely victims (korban), volunteers (relawan) and voices (suara) of the digital age. Each of these complexly mediated personas is endowed with unique attributes and located within a specific corner of Indonesia's digital activism space, and each is integral to efforts to educate diverse publics about the digital issues at stake. These three 'digital keywords' (Peters 2016) may seem both familiar and mundane, but we suggest that the work of personification that they enable has significant consequences for the framing of ongoing civil society struggles in post-Suharto Indonesia. We conclude that whether a certain individual or group is labelled a digital 'victim', 'voice' or 'volunteer' makes a difference to the evolution and eventual outcome of a given techno-political contention.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520298712

Sounding Islam provides a provocative account of the sonic dimensions of religion, combining perspectives from the anthropology of media and sound studies, as well as drawing on neo-phenomenological approaches to atmospheres. Using long-term ethnographic research on devotional Islam in Mauritius, Patrick Eisenlohr explores how the voice, as a site of divine manifestation, becomes refracted in media practices that have become integral parts of religious traditions. At the core of Eisenlohr’s concern is the interplay of voice, media, affect, and listeners’ religious experiences. Sounding Islam sheds new light on a key dimension of religion, the sonic incitement of sensations that are often difficult to translate into language.

Latin American telenovelas began to be widely broadcast on African
screens between the late 1970s and early 1980s, and today are
among the most popular entertainment products on the
continent. The content, aesthetic and narrative format of
telenovelas have become a model for many African video film
producers, who have incorporated some of telenovelas’ defining
elements in their productions in order to attract local audiences.
This special issue analyses the impact of telenovelas’ circulation in
Africa by focusing on the ‘uses’ African audiences and media
producers make of them. Why do telenovelas travel so well
around sub-Saharan Africa? How do African audiences make sense
of them? And what impact do these media products have on local
media entrepreneurs and on the aesthetics and narrative aspects
of the contents they produce? In this introduction we provide
some background and data about the history and the political
economy of telenovelas’ circulation in Africa, and answer the
questions raised above by connecting the finding of the essays
included in the special issue to ongoing debates on the global
circulation of melodrama, on the transformation of African screen
media, and on the performative dimension of African audiences’ engagement with foreign media forms.

This conversation considers some of the disciplinary divides and anxieties surrounding contemporary research on media and mobility through a discussion of linkages between these two research fields and the role of non-media centric focuses on media across the disciplines. The conversation was sparked by the three-day workshop, Anthropologies of Media and Mobility: Theorizing Movement and Circulations across Entangled Fields, held in September, 2017 at The University of Cologne.1 One of the coconvenors Roger Norum sat down with a trio of leading scholars working on media and mobility, Heather Horst, David Morley, and Noel B. Salazar. They address a number of critical topics such as the nature of binary and category disruption, contextually dependent forms of media, the value of collaborative scholarship, the roles of methodologies in academic practice and the critical role played by early-career researchers in pushing various boundaries across our fields.

While Indonesia's burgeoning private television industry has prospered through the country's democratic transition and the rise of popular Islam, it has remained ideologically constrained by many of the content restrictions established during Suharto's New Order era. One area in which producers have broken these norms is in the field of religious imagery, and the adaptation of religiously-themed narratives and tropes. This articlebased on a long-term ethnographic study of television producers in Indonesia and the social institutions that influence themexplores the strategies and goals behind the industry's handling of the imagined religious audience. It asserts that the tension of appeasing cultural conservatives has been redirected by the industry into content that appeals to the much larger demographic of moderate Muslims, through the adaptation of narrative conventions and stylistic forms that draw on an array of global media traditions. It examines new genres and conventions invoked by producers in their efforts to both placate and mobilize religious sentiment among Indonesia's culturally heterogeneous population, arguing that these practices promote a successful, commercial Islam that largely comports with neoliberal subjectivity.