What violent conflict tells us about media and place-making (and vice versa): Ethnographic observations from a revolutionary uprising

Abstract

The increasing mobility of media has in recent years led some scholars to argue for a decline in the significance of place in relation to media. This chapter argues for the importance of understanding media as vitally emplaced in the phenomenological world and it uses violent conflict to develop this point. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with information activists and journalists during the Egyptian uprising, this chapter contests understandings of media as doubling or making place insignificant. Rather, it develops an understanding of media as place-making to allow for an analysis of the entanglements of people and things related to media, showing how media are emplaced in the phenomenological world in the same way that violence is. Doing so, the chapter sheds light on how media can contribute to opening up places to other places and thus influence movements of people and things in conflict.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationTheorising Media and Conflict
EditorsJohn Postill, Philipp Budka , Birgit Bräuchler
VolumeBerghahn Series Anthropology of Media
PublisherBerghahn Books
Chapter10
Publication statusAccepted/In press - 2019
SeriesAnthropology of Media
Volume8

Keywords

  • Faculty of Humanities

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