Katharine Sarikakis

Defending Communicative Spaces The Remits and Limits of the European Parliament

The role of the European Parliament in the formation of media and cultural policies is a largely underresearched area, despite the implications of the institution’s active involvement in supranational decision-making regimes for emancipatory politics in Europe. Through a historical overview, this article argues that the EP has successfully defended existing communicative spaces and promoted the creation of new ones. In its efforts to defend European communications and culture from processes of cultural domination, however, it has failed to acknowledge dominations within the EU. The article positions the institution within a supranational arrangement of economic and political power and identifies the structural constraints and resistance space for public interest centred politics.

A Global Hypothesis for Women in Journalism and Mass Communications: The Ratio of Recurrent and Reinforced Residuum

This article examines the status of women in communications industries and on university faculties. It specifically tests the Ratio of Recurrent and Reinforced Residuum or R3 hypothesis, as developed by Rush and colleagues in the early 1980s. The R3 hypothesis predicts that the percentage of women in the communications industries and on university faculties will follow the ratio residing around a 1/4:3/4 or 1/3:2/3 proportion females to males. This article presents data from a nationwide US survey and compares them to data from global surveys and UN reports. The evidence is overwhelming and shows the relevance and validity of the R3 hypothesis across different socioeconomic and cultural contexts. The article argues that the ratio is the outcome of systemic discrimination that operates at multiple levels. The obstacles to achieving equality in the academy as well as media industries are discussed and suggestions for breaking out of the R3 ratio are included.

The Trouble with Gender: Media Policy and Gender Mainstreaming in the European Union

Abstract This article explores the ways in which gender mainstreaming (GM) approaches have failed to become integrated in the EU media policy framework and seeks to analyse the reasons why. It argues that the degree of implementation of GM in the media policy area depends on the dynamics of structural power determinants, in particular the structure of opportunities of the DG in charge of the policy area and the institutional structures in general, as well as the influence of particular interests upon the policy process. The article focuses on two of the areas identified by the UN Platform for Action in 1995 supported by the EU: mis/representation of women in the media and women’s participation in the decision‐making process.

MEDIATING SOCIAL COHESION: MEDIA AND CULTURAL POLICY IN THE EUROPEAN UNION AND CANADA

The paper explores the ways in which audiovisual media policies articulate a particular agenda for cultural and political diversity in the European Union. It explores the approaches of Canada and EU to the question of social cohesion and problematises their respective agenda priorities. Locating media policy within the globalised context of market integration and supra-and-international policymaking, the article identifies not only perceptions – and realities – of concerns shared across two distinctive political and social contexts, Canada and the EU, but also a remarkable similarity in their approach to these problems. The article argues that globalisation provides a broader context within which the quest for diversity and the processes leading to the articulation of solutions and future policy is directly linked to the interaction between the pressures deriving from the conflict of representation of private interests and the social justice claims from diverse corners of societies.

Priorities in global media policy transfer: Audiovisual and digital policy mutations in the EU, MERCOSUR and US triangle

This article investigates the flow of communication policy principles across the supranational, international and national levels, through the lens of policy transfer. Policy transfer is a new concept for the field of media and communication studies. The article utilizes and expands on the concept to study the case of digital policy flows between leading regional powers, the EU and USA and MERCOSUR. The article argues that EU and US policy priorities are reflected in the Latin American policy framework, which shifts from a focus on audiovisual and culture-centred objectives to the digital economy paradigm. MERCOSUR then functions as a policy broker between ‘outside’ interests and those of its member states through the influence of international key players whose interests clash with those of regional goals.

Arriving at a Crossroads

Women’s scholarship and activism seem to find themselves at a crossroads quite often, perhaps with a higher frequency than other areas in the academy. The reasons are to be found in the very “nature” of feminism, which requires—indeed demands—to constantly re-evaluate, deconstruct and demystify the world in order to answer the question that a curious feminist asks: where are the women? It requires highest attention to the nuanced and profound changes in women’s lives and vigilance to protect rights. It also requires a good deal of reflection on one’s own personal position and an honest look at the field and its relation to the social, cultural, and political world. I will try to address some of the questions set for us by the editors of Feminist Media Studies by first declaring a personal bias: for me, one’s intellectual work is vacuous if it is not matched by one’s politics. Intellectual work and the production of systematic knowledge cannot be separated from everyday life. As such, the politics of care imposes the obligation to always seek to understand or, as Jean-Francois Lyotard (2002) argues, to “translate” the language that “others” speak. Feminism is certainly about life politics, about changing lives and politics. To me, this constitutes the moral compass for the feminist media scholar to seek out connections that can bridge divides, even if only temporarily. As times change, often violently and rapidly, it is even more pertinent that feminist media scholars ask the difficult and unpopular questions that “post-feminisms” and various “deaths” (of ideology, geography, history) attempt to render passé. By doing so, we find ourselves at a crossroads when important changes must be understood: “languages” must be “translated,” and decisions must be made about our scholarly and activist paths. I think that we now are at a crossroads that concerns first, the directions of research we take and, second, the ways in which we turn those into action, not only in terms of feminists’ relation to the world of politicism but to “other” feminists too. Feminist writing in media studies follows closely the feminist movement in its variations and richness, speaking to the important issues that women experience at any historical moment that help us make sense of the media around us (Rosalind Gill 2007; Sue Thornham 2007). As such, it reflects the rifts and connections in feminist thought. Feminist media studies pays attention to women’s position vis-à-vis mediated and cultural spaces across the domains of production and consumption, across technologies and geographies, practices and values. The dominant paradigm of feminist intervention has concentrated on

Social Media Users’ Legal Consciousness About Privacy:

This article explores the ways in which the concept of privacy is understood in the context of social media and with regard to users’ awareness of privacy policies and laws in the ‘Post-Snowden’ era. In the light of presumably increased public exposure to privacy debates, generated partly due to the European “Right to be Forgotten” ruling and the Snowden revelations on mass surveillance, this article explores users’ meaning-making of privacy as a matter of legal dimension in terms of its violations and threats online and users’ ways of negotiating their Internet use, in particular social networking sites. Drawing on the concept of legal consciousness, this article explores through focus group interviews the ways in which social media users negotiate privacy violations and what role their understanding of privacy laws (or lack thereof) might play in their strategies of negotiation. The findings are threefold: first, privacy is understood almost universally as a matter of controlling one’s own data, including information disclosure even to friends, and is strongly connected to issues about personal autonomy; second, a form of resignation with respect to control over personal data appears to coexist with a recognized need to protect one’s private data, while respondents describe conscious attempts to circumvent systems of monitoring or violation of privacy, and third, despite widespread coverage of privacy legal issues in the press, respondents’ concerns about and engagement in “self-protecting” tactics derive largely from being personally affected by violations of law and privacy.

Defining authorship in user-generated content: Copyright struggles in The Game of Thrones

The notion of authorship is a core element in antipiracy campaigns accompanying an emerging copyright regime, worldwide. These campaigns are built on discourses that aim to ‘problematize’ the issues of ‘legality’ of content downloading practices, ‘protection’ for content creators and the alleged damage caused to creators’ livelihood by piracy. Under these tensions, fandom both subverts such discourses, through sharing and production practices, and legitimizes industry’s mythology of an ‘original’ author. However, how is the notion of authorship constructed in the cooperative spaces of fandom? The article explores the most popular fandom sites of A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series that inspires the TV-show Game of Thrones and argues that the notion of authorship is not one-dimensional, but rather consists of attributes that develop across three processes: community building, the creative and the industrial/production process. Here, fandom constructs a figure of the ‘author’ which, although more complex than the one presented by the industry in its copyright/anti-piracy campaigns, maintains the status quo of regulatory frameworks based on the idea of a ‘primary’ creator.

Reluctant activists? The impact of legislative and structural attempts of surveillance on investigative journalism

If we accept that surveillance by the State and ‘sousveillance’ by the media in Western democracies tend towards a relative equilibrium, or ‘equiveillance’ supported by the function of journalism as a watchdog and that the rule of law largely protects fundamental freedoms, this paper argues that the act of ‘mutual watching’ is undesired by the State and comes at a very high cost to journalists. The combination of technological capacity, legislative change and antidemocratic sentiments of the State, in the context of its willingness and ability to collect and process Big Data on an unprecedented scale, disrupt the preconditions for a strong democracy based on free media and free citizens. This paper examines the politics of investigative journalism under the conditions of dominance of the State by investigating the experiences of journalists with surveillance. Our interviews with 48 journalists show that journalists are acutely aware of surveillance and its noxious impact. Well beyond simple ‘watching’ these experiences are remarkably similar in non-Western and Western countries. Journalists are engaging increasingly with technological and other communities, as they aim to defend journalism and their lives. Their activism is operationalised in three areas: (a) in reluctant often-fraught cooperation with hacktivists, (b) in self-directed protection of communications and sources and (c) in not always willingly acting as dissenters vis-a-vis the State. This paper explores the extent to which journalists consider equilibrium to be distorted, and how they are countering any slide into subdued democracy.

Digital Rights Management and Rights Licensing in the Online Music Sector: A Case for Cultural Diversity?

Digital technologies have fundamentally altered the ways in which cultural content is produced, distributed, accessed and enjoyed. Ensuring easy access to digital content online in general and music works in particular has generated a heated debate at the European Union (EU) level over copyright management. Accounting for this has been the longstanding territorial structure of copyright, that is, the practice of clearing rights for the lawful use of copyright protected content on a territorially limited basis — an element that was left untouched by EU harmonisation. With a view to promoting the expansion of digital music services in Europe and their broad uptake, the European Commission (Commission) has sought to encourage models of collective rights management that guarantee a one-stop shop for multi-territorial, pan-European rights clearance. Action initially built on non-binding legislative instruments and the application of EU competition rules. In July 2012, it culminated in a proposal for a Directive on collective rights management and the multi-territorial licensing of rights in musical works for online uses (European Commission, 2012e). In February 2014, the relevant Directive was adopted by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU (Council) (European Parliament and Council, 2014b).