Miyase Christensen

The Afterlife of Eurovision 2003: Turkish and European Social Imaginaries and Ephemeral Communicative Space

Save for Israel, no other nation participating in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) challenges popular notions of what it means to be “European” (geographically and/or culturally) to the extent than does Turkey. As the nation begins a long process toward membership of the European Union (EU), debates have flared (often in the print and broadcast media) over the “European-ness” of Turkey. It is interesting to note that, along with the third place achieved by the Turkish soccer team in the 2002 World Cup, the ESC victory in 2003 put the nation on the international “popular culture map” as never before. In this paper, the authors will analyze and discuss coverage in the international and Turkish press of Turkeys victory in the 2003 ESC and the extent to which a discursive space was opened in which the idea of Turkish “European-ness” (or “non-Europeanness”) was addressed and debated.

Complicit surveillance, interveillance, and the question of cosmopolitanism: Toward a phenomenological understanding of mediatization

The institutional and meta-processual dimensions of surveillance have been scrutinized extensively in literature. In these accounts, the subjective, individual level has often been invoked in relation to subject–object, surveillor–surveilled dualities and in terms of the kinds of subjectivity modern and late-modern institutions engender. The experiential, ontological realm of the “mediatized everyday” vis-a-vis surveillance remains less explored, particularly from the phenomenological perspective of the lifeworld. Academic discourses of surveillance mostly address rhetorically oriented macro-perspectives. The same diagnosis largely applies to the debates on the cosmopolitanization process. The literature of cosmopolitanism revolves around broad cultural and ethical transformations in terms of the relationship between Self and Other, individual and humanity, and the local and the universal. Our aim in this article is to conceptualize the dynamics that yield a cosmopolitan Self and an encapsulated Self under conditions of increasingly interactive and ubiquitous forms of mediation and surveillance.

Cosmopolitanism and the media : cartographies of change

Acknowledgements PART I: MAPPING THE TERRAIN: BOUNDARIES AND BRIDGES 1. Introductory Essay: Cosmopolitanization, Mediatization and Social Change 2. Cosmopolitan Trajectories: Connectivity, Reflexivity and Symbolic Power 3. Remediated Sociality and the Dual Logic of Surveillance PART II: CONTEXTUALIZING SPACE, MOBILITY AND BELONGING 4. Transnational Media Flows: Globalization, Politics and Identity 5. Transclusion vs. Demediation: Mediatization and the Re-Embedding of Cosmopolitanism 6. Cities, Embodied Expressivity and Morality of Proximity 7. In Conclusion: Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents References Index

The Arab Spring As Meta-Event and Communicative Spaces

The uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, immediately labeled “the Arab Spring,” are best described as processes rather than outcomes. Despite being a common area of media focus due to decades-long geopolitics, the Arab Spring, as a mediatized meta-event, has led to the reemergence of the region as a discursive territory. The communicative spaces that opened up during and in the aftermath of the uprisings allowed for a multiplicity of topics to reenter public discourse across local, national, and transnational scales. In the process, seasoned debates such as religious sectarianism and democratic institutionalization gained magnitude. More specific debates such as Turkey’s role as a model/antimodel added new discursive aspects to the multitopic ensemble. The purpose of this article is to reflect on the communicative and scalar dimensions in the mediation of the Arab Spring by way of taking the debates on Turkey as a case in point.

Geopolitics and the Popular

When Popular Communication made its debut in 2003 as an independent, but affiliated, journal of the International Communication Association, editors Sharon Mazzarella and Norma Pecora stated in their Editors’ Introduction to the first issue that a primary intellectual challenge of the journal was to break free of the productivist bias of the media studies of its time and to investigate the ways in which “communication is ‘made popular’” (Zelizer, 2000, p. 312, as cited in Mazzarella & Pecora, 2003, p. 2). In the process, the editors proposed that the implicit distinctions between popular communication and popular culture could be clarified for exploring culture as communication. The second team of editors, Jonathan Gray, C. Lee Harrington, and Cornel Sandvoss, internationalized the scope of popular communication studies and pushed for a broader range of theories and methods to be represented. In 2013, your new editors reflect on popular communication scholarship through the prism of world events and their underlying dynamics. This special issue on geopolitics considers culture and communication as variables changing together in relation to global structures and processes, without resorting to the productivist bias. Our approach marks a departure from much of the more recent work in the field, which considers culture as foundational for social reality and popular communication as its basic expression, whether in reception or in more indirect processes. Ten years of research and theory published in the journal reveals many approaches to popular communication, including political economy, which illustrate how communication is made popular as a consequence of changing political, economic, and technological factors. To take it a step further, we should assert that today geopolitics is not only about conflict and conflict resolution but also about national re/positioning strategies.

Notes on the Public Sphere on a National and Post-National Axis : Journalism and Freedom of Expression in Turkey

Since Turkey became a candidate for the European Union in 1999, democratic rights and freedom of expression have been key issues in discourses surrounding EU—Turkey relations. Discussions on these questions often centre on state censorship and legislative constraints. The role of the media themselves, however, and the deeply-ingrained elements and historically-contingent norms and practices within public culture that shape the public sphere, have received a significantly lower level of attention. Despite recent legislative changes towards greater freedom of expression, major hurdles that limit democratic rights and freedoms persist in practice, as highlighted by the judicial trial (and the subsequent murder in January 2007) of the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink. The police raid of Nokta magazine in 2007 is another case in point. The purpose of this article is to discuss current questions related with freedom of expression and tolerance of diversity in the Turkish media based on in-depth interviews with journalists and with the Dink and Nokta cases as examples; and to offer critical reflections on the public sphere in Turkey in its current state.

New Media Geographies and the Middle East

This special issue of Television & New Media brings together current research on media technologies, society, and culture in the Middle East from diverse methodological and analytical perspectives. The topics addressed cover a wide spectrum: circulation of Arab music videos and public discourse; Lebanese bloggers and mediated public spheres; transnational television audiences and ontological security; social media, TV talk shows, and political change in Egypt; youth-generated Arab media and cultural politics; and the Arab Spring as an ephemeral communicative space. Together, the articles provide a panorama of how today’s multimodal media geographies and engaged actors reinscribe public cultures and politics in the Middle East.

Introduction to Special Issue on Environmental Themes in Popular Narratives

Over the past decade, environmental themes, such as climate change and loss of biodiversity, have occupied significant space in narratives that circulate through legacy media as well as other popular channels such as online and mobile platforms, museums, films and literature. Environmental issues are de facto entangled with the politics and discourses of globalization, and such narratives are increasingly networked, connected and homogenized, multiplied and diversified. Popular narratives constitute powerful tools that shape the sociocultural context of environmental change, influence policymaking and inform public understanding to considerable degrees. Narratives portraying future scenarios and environmental transformations are used and remediated through a multitude of popular communication venues. This special collection of articles explores various constructions of the environment and environmental change mediated through virtual sites and thematic constructions in different popular venues, providing an account of how we imagine and reproduce ideas of the environment. We take popular communication here to include the entire “grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of everyday life” (Burkart & Christensen, 2013, p. 3) expressed in literature, media, film, social movements and other performances and speech acts. Several cross-cutting lenses are instrumental in seeking to grasp the complexities of how environmental themes travel through popular sites. A space-specific approach can help reveal the significance of space in considering environmental imaginaries. The actual and virtual sites and locales (e.g. museums, electronic media space, literature, film, music, archives, etc.) where narrative interventions materialize constitute spaces of narrativity. Narrated space (such as “the ocean” in a broad, and “the Arctic” or “the Ozone layer” in specific senses) signifies the site of environmental transformation. In the case of cinema, for example, this “territorial ontology that underlies the world of any film” (Ivakhev, 2013) emerges as a result of complex, multi-actor production choices and the viewers’ own implicit understandings and perception, while appearing as “given”. Due to both the networked nature of planetary scales (e.g. the Great Barrier Reef and the Arctic both being local/ized sites of global significance and human and non-human flows) and transmedial flows in today’s convergent media landscapes, a scalar conception that emphasizes the notion of scalar transcendence (Christensen, 2013) helps to further think of the actual-virtual sites and (re)mediated reach of environmental narratives and framings. The contributions to this special collection explore different narrative spaces and scales in popular science writing, zombie fiction, popular music, social media, and news media.

Globalization, Climate Change and the Media: An Introduction

In the summer of 2011, the tanker STI Heritage left Houston, Texas and made the long, arduous journey to Thailand, eventually arriving with over 60,000 tons of condensed gas.1 What made this trip special was not the start and end points (these are two major ports), but rather how, and how fast, the tanker made the journey. Instead of the traditional route via the Suez Canal, the STI Heritage picked up the condensed gas in Murmansk, Russia, and continued its journey towards Thailand via the Northeast Passage, a shipping lane running from Murmansk, along Siberia, ending at the Bering Strait. The use of this lane is, in and of itself, not unique, as historically portions of it have been navigable for two summer months each year. What made the STI Heritage voyage special, however, was the speed with which the vessel completed the entire route: eight days.2 This was a record for the Northeast Passage (broken weeks later by a gas tanker that made the trip in just over six days), which has seen a dramatic reduction of summer ice over the past decade, making commercial use of the lane economically viable, at least if one extrapolates from the numbers. In 2009, only two commercial vessels made the voyage. In 2011, that number had increased to 18.3

Slow Violence in the Anthropocene: An Interview with Rob Nixon on Communication, Media, and the Environmental Humanities

Slow Violence in the Anthropocene : An Interview with Rob Nixon on Communication, Media, and the Environmental Humanities