We are excited to announce the publication of the latest edition of the
open access journal /Culture Machine./
/Culture Machine/19 (2020): Media Populism, guest-edited by Giuseppe
Fidotta, Joshua Neves and Joaquin Serpe:
https://culturemachine.net/archives/vol-19-media-populism/
<https://culturemachine.net/archives/vol-19-media-populism/>
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/Culture Machine/is part of Open Humanities Press:
http://openhumanitiespress.org <http://openhumanitiespress.org>
and the Radical Open Access Collective:
http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk
<http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk>
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Vol. 19: Media Populism, guest-edited by Giuseppe Fidotta, Joshua Neves
and Joaquin Serpe.
Contents
Editorial
- Giuseppe Fidotta, Joshua Neves, & Joaquin Serpe
From Populist Media to Media Populism
- Giuseppe Fidotta, Joshua Neves, & Joaquin Serpe
Big Bad Social Media: Distributed Affects and Popular Politics–
Bishnupriya Ghosh
Unsettling News: Newstrack and the Video Event - Ishita Tiwary
Analogy in Ruins: Populism, Transgression, and the Zombie - David
Bering-Porter
Populist Realisms and Counterfeit Aesthetics – Jason Pine
Manifesto Writing as Populist Praxis (Within the University Classroom
and Beyond) - Kay Dickinson
Media versus Masses? Notes on Contemporary Populism and the Crisis of
Late Liberalism in the U.S. and India - Arvind Rajagopal
Island Fever: Videated Populism and Disputed Geography at Sea – Weixian Pan
Stuck in Mud in the Fields of Athenry: Apple, Territory, and Popular
Politics – Patrick Brodie
Below is an excerpt of Media Populism's Editorial Introduction
(https://culturemachine.net/vol-19-media-populism/editorial-introduction-media-populism/):
"Parasitical, unstable, excessive, corrupt, inexact, threatening—the
intellectual history of /populism/ is, to say the least, vexed. ‘Few
terms have been so widely used in contemporary political analysis’,
Ernesto Laclau famously observed, and ‘few have been defined with less
precision’ (1977: 143). As populism has increasingly become ‘the
preserve of political scientists’ (Rovira Kaltwasser /et al/., 2017: 10;
Canovan, 1982), so too has its focus on political parties and movements
become a default position in academic and popular thought. This
orientation, today contested by many political scientists but
nonetheless widespread, has the advantage of making populism visible,
even measurable, through its analysis of speeches, polls, rallies, and
electoral victories. At the same time, the narrow focus on parties and
movements has created conceptual and epistemological barriers that
continue to impede the emergence of new perspectives—on, for instance,
the relationship between media and populism—that fall outside of
political scientific frameworks, confirming Chantal Mouffe’s (2005)
assertion that political theory alone is not equipped to answer
populism’s contemporary challenges, even at an analytical level. Apart
from the difficulty of disembodying populism from parties and movements,
this approach remains closely allied to rational-choice assumptions,
failing to embrace the /many/ affective and infrastructural dimensions
that are constitutive of the political sphere. Overcoming these
limitations has been, and still is, a major challenge to the study of
populism. Responding to /Culture Machine/’s call to open up cultural and
theoretical research beyond established paradigms, this special issue
brings problems of media and mediation to bear on populist phenomena and
debates.
Our point of departure is the idea that populism mediates, that is, it
comes in between, channels or interrupts the ordinary operations of
social and political life. However, in order to comprehend such
processes, we need to take media and mediation seriously. As we argue in
our companion essay, the prevailing approaches to populist media in
political theory remain narrowly focused on what populists say and do in
the media, as if the media was merely a container of information or an
ideology to be debunked. In contrast, this special issue aims to bring
media studies into conversation with debates in social and political
theory, among other fields, and to explore the centrality of media,
meant in a broader sense than just neutral channels for direct and
unmediated exchange between demagogues and receptive audiences, for
apprehending populism. In this respect, the essays collected in this
issue move beyond the traditional scales and objects of populist
research, placing questions of media and mediation front and center.
Case studies range from zombies and pedagogy, video events and affective
publics, counterfeit aesthetics and the internet ocean. Some of our
contributors investigate forms of mediation that lend themselves more
clearly to populist mobilizations. Others explore representations of the
people in historically situated ‘new’ media. Others address the
affective dimensions of populism as channeled through media aesthetics
and platforms. Taken together, these interventions open up genealogical
and multi-scalar perspectives on populism, while also speaking to the
complexity of media populist forms and magnitudes, and their role in
shaping contemporary political imaginaries."
--
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Faculty of Arts & Humanities,
Coventry University:
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures
http://www.garyhall.info
Forthcoming:
Book: A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/a-stubborn-fury/
Latest:
Article: ’Anti-Bourgeois Theory’:
http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/91
See also the following responses to ’Anti-Bourgeois Theory’:
Gabriela Méndez Cota, 'Pirate Traces':
http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/114
Jeremy Gilbert, 'Anti-Bourgeois For What?':
http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/115
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