Not available in 2024/25
MC401 Half Unit
Mediated Resistance and Activism
This information is for the 2024/25 session.
Teacher responsible
Prof Bart Cammaerts
Availability
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.
Pre-requisites
Students are required to prepare a statement of no more than 200 words in response to the following question, which must be submitted when selecting this course on 番茄社区 for You: Why are you interested in the intersection of media, communication and activism?
Please do not email the teacher with personal expressions of interest as these are not required and do not influence who is offered a place
Course content
This course focuses on the various ways in which citizens, activists and social movements use, appropriate and shape media and communication technologies to resist, to mobilise for resistance, but also how resistance and movement discourses are 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. 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 action repertoires, self-mediation practices, mainstream media representations, 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.
Seminar discussions revolve around relevant readings as well as case study presentations.