Prof Bart Cammaerts FAW-601c

This course is available on the MSc in Media and Communications and MSc in Politics and Communication. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course aims to examine the various ways in which citizens, activists and social movements use, appropriate and shape media and communication technologies to resist and mobilise for resistance, but also how resistance is represented and mediated, by activists themselves through movement and social media as well as by the mainstream media. The course will address several aspects of the intricate relationship between media and communication, resistance and activism, but this inevitably also implicates the state and the market in terms of the structural limitations to the emancipatory use of media and communication. The course is organised around the core-concept of the 'mediation opportunity structure' referring to the opportunities for agency through media and communication, as well as the structural constraints preventing agency and stifling dissent. Both Information and Communication Technologies (ICT's) and more traditional media will be considered and a dialectical perspective on power and the relationship between agency and structure is adopted with a particular emphasis on strategies of resistance and circumvention.

At a theoretical level this course is situated at the intersection of social movement theory, political theory and media and communication theory. The different lectures will focus on various aspects of the mediation opportunity structure, including mainstream media representation, self-mediation practices, counter-hegemony, networked opportunities – using examples from various regions in the world. Some case-studies will be situated at a local level of analysis, others at a national, while again others might relate to regional contexts or even transnational levels of contestation.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the LT.

All students are expected to complete advanced reading, prepare seminar presentations and submit one essay of 1,500 words.

• Bailey, Olga, Cammaerts, Bart and Carpentier, Nico (2007) Understanding Alternative Media, Maidenhead: Open University Press.

• Barassi, Veronica (2015) Activism on the Web: Everyday Struggles Against Digital Capitalism. London: Routledge.

• Bennett, Lance and Segerberg, Alexandra (2013) The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the personalization of Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Cammaerts, Bart (2018) The Circulation of Anti-Austerity Protest. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan

• Cammaerts, Bart, Matoni, Alice and McCurdy, Patrick (eds) (2013) Mediation and Protest Movements. Bristol: Intellect.

• Caygill, Howard (2013) On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance. London: Bloomsbury Press.

• della Porta, Donnatella and Diani, Mario (2006) Social Movements: An introduction - 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

• Dencik, Lina and Leistert, Oliver (eds) (2015) Critical Perspectives on Social Media and Protest: Between Control and Emancipation. London: Rowman and Littlefield.

• Downing, John (2001) Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

• Earl, Jennifer and Kimport, Katrina (2011) Digitally Enabled Social Change: activism in the Internet Age. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

• Fenton, Natalie (2016) Digital, Political, Radical. Cambridge: Polity.

• Johnston, Hank (2014) What is a Social Movement?. Cambridge: Polity.

• Martín-Barbero, Jesús (1993) Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediation. London: Sage.

Essay (100%, 3000 words) in the ST.

This course examines the various ways in which media and communication are relevant to activism, to social movements and ultimately to social and political change. It will help students understand how not only media representations, but also the use of media and communication tools by activists are shaping contemporary activism and resistance.  

Students' comments

"Lecturer was very engaging, lectures and seminars were very insightful."