Media and Social Change

MARK HOBART is Professor of Critical Media & Cultural Studies at SOAS. He has conducted over eight years’ research in Indonesia, mostly in Bali and Central Java. His interest in media arose contingently through ethnography. During a fieldtrip in 1988, he discovered that Balinese had given up much of their popular theatrical entertainment and public social life to watch television. Researching first audiences, then television production in Indonesia, he began to appreciate the extent to which media studies relied on entirely imaginary accounts of audiences and ideal models of media production. Since then, both he and his research students have been examining mass media production, distribution, reception, use and commentary as social practices in a range of societies. The results indicate the incoherence of much media theory and suggest the need for a critical reappraisal of the mass media in terms of practice. His website is criticalia.org.

JENS KJAERULFF is a social anthropologist (PhD, Aarhus University, Denmark) who has held positions at anthropology departments in Canada (Simon Fraser University and University of Victoria) and in the UK (University of Manchester). He recently published a monograph entitled Internet and Change (2010, Intervention Press) which examines recent transformations in economic practice based on fieldwork among people working via the internet from their homes in rural Denmark (see internetandchange.com). Kjaerulff presently works independently on various research projects related to the theme of change, among them an edited volume on ‘Flexible Capitalism’.

DAN MCQUILLAN is a Lecturer in Creative and Social Computing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His background includes a PhD in Experimental Particle Physics, adventures in community activism, digital campaigning with Amnesty International, and co-founding Social Innovation Camp (http://www.sicamp.org). Tweets as @danmcquillan.

MARK ALLEN PETERSON holds a joint position in Anthropology and International Studies at Miami University. A former political journalist in Washington, DC, Professor Peterson received his PhD from Brown University in 1996.  Peterson has conducted fieldwork in Egypt, India and the U.S.  He is the author of the books Anthropology and Mass Communication: Myth and Media in the New Millennium (Berghahn 2003) and Connected in Cairo: Growing Up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East (Indiana 2011). He is co-author of International Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Global Issues (Westview 2008). Peterson is co-editor of the Anthropology of Media book series (Berghahn). He blogs at www.connectedincairo.com

SARAH PINK is Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University, UK, and during the academic year 2010-2011 Visiting Scholar at the IN3 (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute) at the Open University of Catalonia, in Barcelona. Her theoretical and ethnographic work, rooted in social and visual anthropology, is usually interdisciplinary. Much of her work is applied and it is part of her agenda to make strong connections between research that leads to applied interventions and theoretical and methodological scholarship. Her current research focuses on digital and visual media, the senses, activism, sustainability and energy in urban and domestic contexts. Her theoretical work develops questions around concepts of place, practice, movement and experience, and also relates these principles to the development of routes to ethnographic knowledge and representation through a focus on the digital and the senses.

URSULA RAO is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her research focus is urban life and cultural transformations. She has worked in India for over 15 years and has written on urban space, Hindi- and English journalism and ritual theory. Some of her recent English language publications are News as Cultures: Journalistic Practices and the Remaking of Indian Leadership Traditions (2010, Oxford: Berghahn) and The Cultural Politics of Disadvantage in South Asia (Asian Studies Review 33 (4), 2009, edited with Assa Doron). See her homepage.

RAQUEL RECUERO (@raquelrecuero) is an Associate Professor and researcher at the Departments of Applied Linguistics and Social Communication in Universidade Católica de Pelotas (UCPel) in Brazil. Her research focuses on Internet social networks, virtual communities and computer mediated-communication, trying to understand the impact of the Internet on sociability and language in South America and Brazil. She received her PhD in Communication and Information from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) for her dissertation on “Social Networks in Fotolog.com” in 2006, and has recently published her first book in Portuguese, Internet Social Networks (Redes Sociais na Internet: Sulina, 2009) and also co-authored  the book Research Methods for Internet (Métodos de Pesquisa para Internet – Sulina, 2010).  Recuero blogs at the Digital Learning Research Hub (in English) and also has a personal blog (in Portuguese).

ANNABELLE SREBERNY is Professor at the Centre for Media and Film Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is interested in the discourses around globalization and culture, especially as articulated by non-Western states and populations. She is also interested in processes of empowerment and democratization, particularly as experienced by women and minority/diasporic communities. Her latest book, Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran (with Gholam Khiabany) warns against stereotyping bloggers as dissidents, and argues that the Internet is changing things in ways which neither the government nor the democracy movement could have anticipated.