New Book: Media Practices, Social Movements, and Performativity: Transdisciplinary Approaches (Routledge 2018)
New Book: Media Practices, Social Movements, and Performativity: Transdisciplinary Approaches
News from Oct 06, 2017
Quotidian digital media have fundamentally transformed the ways in which public protest is articulated today. Think of movements like Occupy and the Arab Spring, the protests in Gezi Park in Istanbul and the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Protest is nowadays voiced on the street and online at the same time. In these performative acts, we discern calls for community and perceive individual acts of articulation. The volume addresses such developments in an interdisciplinary collaboration between media and communication studies, and theater and performance studies.
The volume presents international case studies on the new dynamics of protest, articulation and community along with two programmatic articles on the role and legacies of performativity in the affiliated disciplines. The case studies cover a wide cultural and geographical terrain - from Mexico to Japan, from German to Greece. A core interest is to develop the notion of media practice theoretically and employ it analytically to these divergent settings. On the basis of performative and practice-theoretical approaches the contributors show the specific local embeddedness of new forms of publicness that emerge in protest movements. They achieve to differentiate how technological change is necessarily embedded in these conditions but need not be a principal force. The volume thus covers a broad range of performative experiments, historical case studies and new forms of collective articulation.
The volume makes an important contribution to debates about technological globalisation and political change, about media usage and potentials of political emancipation. In an interdisciplinary dialogue of media and communication studies with theater and dance studies, the contributions highlight the versatility of performativity and media practice as an analytic approach. The volume was edited by Susanne Foellmer, Margreth Lünenborg and Christoph Raetzsch.
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