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Monitorial Citizen: the ordinary witness

Speakers: Stuart Allan,UK, Joke Hermes NL, Cynthia Carter UK, Nico Carpentier BE/SE, Nicos Trimikliniotis CY James Bridle UK/GR

Moderator: Corina Demetriou CY

Saturday, 9th December 2017

Auditorium 2, Tassos Papadopoulos Lecture Hall Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol

18.30 - 22:00

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Stuart Allan (UK)

Citizen Video Witnessing of Human Rights: The Case of WITNESS

The performative act of bearing witness has been theorised from a myriad of vantage points, particularly where the visual representation of war, conflict and crisis events has been centred for critique. This presentation, in seeking to envisage an alternative analytical framework, begins by discerning several points of epistemic tension in journalistic claims made regarding the social responsibilities of truthful witnessing. Next, its focus turns to WITNESS.org, an international non-profit organisation widely perceived to be a leader in a global movement to create change by developing citizen-centred approaches to human rights reportage. Launched in 1992, its current website declares its aim to empower ‘human rights defenders to use video to fight injustice, and to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools that can pressure those in power or with power to act.’ The initial strategy, namely to provide ‘people who chose to be in the wrong place at the right time’ with cameras so as to help them document violations and abuses in the field, has evolved to prioritise both activists’ and ordinary citizens’ engagement in personal reportage with a view to its evidential importance for the advancement of human rights causes. The gradual consolidation of their present commitments to training, campaigning, and preservation will be shown to have been decisively shaped though a complex negotiation of exigent pressures and constraints, not least where harnessing the power of visual technologies in the service of digital storytelling is concerned. Differing perceptions of WITNESS’s influence and humanitarian impact will be discussed throughout, particularly with regard to specific initiatives. In striving to bring to the fore certain ethical, journalistic, and strategic tensions at the heart of video advocacy, I will contend that WITNESS raises significant questions regarding how the right to bear witness is consolidating amongst diverse communities of interest mobilising across globalising communicative networks.

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Stuart Allan is Professor and Head of the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies (JOMEC) at Cardiff University, UK. Stuart has published widely in journalism, media and cultural studies. He has authored seven books, the most recent of which is Citizen Witnessing: Revisioning Journalism in Times of Crisis (Polity Press, 2013), and edited eleven others, including The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism (Routledge, 2012; revised edition)and Photojournalism and Citizen Journalism: Co-operation, Collaboration and Connectivity (Routledge, 2017). His research has also appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and contributions to edited collections, and has been translated into several languages. He serves on the editorial boards of fifteen international journals, including Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism; Digital Journalism; New Media & Society; Media, War & Conflict; Communication, Culture & Critique; Text & Talk; Environmental Communication; Time & Society; Journalism & Communication Monographs; and Global Media and China.

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Joke Hermes (NL)

On reconnecting with disengaged sceptics

A quarter century of media literacy training has resulted in a new generation of sceptics. From a young age on children are taught by anxious parents across backgrounds of class and culture not to trust the media much the same way as they are taught never to trust unknown adults. The fairly minimal and predominantly white and middle-class media literacy training offered in and via schools, does much the same thing. What was intended to be the cultivation of a critical and engaged mind set turned out to be the perfect preparation for the new online networked social world. Algorithm-based filter bubbles fit seamlessly with digital self-enclosure producing small worlds that provide immunisation against a frightening and bad world outside. Whilst there is a burgeoning industry of media literacy training, it appears to move away from citizenship as connection, co-ownership and a shared responsibility for the world. This paper is an invitation to query how critical media literacy training may well be a doomed middle-class venture. Instead we (concerned citizens, engaged academics) need to understand the challenge to connect in a populist world in which work has both been casualised and made the singular key to social status and success. Finding ways and means to meet and talk with young people across the different enclaves they live their lives in, and to hear their stories, is a first port of call.

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Joke Hermes is a professor of applied research in Media, Culture and Citizenship at Inholland University, she teaches television studies at the University of Amsterdam. She has published widely on gender, media, popular culture, research methodology and the creative industries. Recent work includes a study of independent workers in the creative industries; the hatred of Breaking Bad’s Skyler White in online audience discussion and white reluctance to give up on racist stereotype in the Dutch Black Pete controversy. She is currently developing participant design methods both for creative industries research more generally and intercultural media literacy research specifically, as well as a new book on watching ‘post’ television. She is founder and co-editor of the European journal of Cultural Studies.

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Cynthia Carter (UK)

Citizen Journalism and Children: Investigating Rights of Access, Opportunity and Voice The perception that the news media are central to the advancement of children’s civic inclusion in democratic societies is widespread, yet seldom explored in its own right. This is despite what is typically regarded to be journalism’s informal, unwritten responsibility to each new generation to help establish, from an early age, a sense of public belonging as well as opportunities for collective political participation and engagement. This paper begins by examining the research literatures on children and news, challenging the prevailing tendency to focus on exposing the potential negative “effects” of news reporting on children and young people. Insufficient attention has been paid, I will argue, to the importance of children’s information and communication rights (access, opportunity and voice). Drawing upon evidence from several case studies I have conducted over recent years, I argue that emergent, innovative forms of citizen journalism have a vital role to play in deepening children’s understanding of a wide range of pressing contemporary issues, including social justice, human rights, community cohesion and global interdependence. Alternative, children-centred forms of citizen journalism, it will be shown, possess considerable potential to further develop children’s democratic citizenship in progressive ways.

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Cynthia Carter is a Reader in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University, with research interests and expertise in news, journalism and gender; children, news and citizenship; and media violence. Her recent books include the Routledge Companion to Media and Gender (2014) and Current Perspectives in Feminist Media Studies (2013) and is currently working on a co-edited book for Routledge, Journalism, Gender and Power (with Linda Steiner and Stuart Allan). She is founding Co-Editor of Feminist Media Studies (Routledge) and serves on the editorial boards of numerous academic journals.

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Nico Carpentier (BE/SE)

The dark sides of online participation In discussions of online participation, optimism often prevails, leading to an unabridged celebration of the participatory capacity of the online, or in the more nuanced versions, to a celebration of its participatory potential. One of the consequences is that still too little attention is spent on the processes that limit ordinary people's participation within the online. This paper will start from a definition of participation as an equalised power relationship in decision-making processes, a position which allows distinguishing between many different participatory intensities, ranging from more minimalist to more maximalist versions. Within this framework, the paper aims to look at processes that reduce participation within the online to the more minimalist versions. The focus will be placed less on more traditional problems, such as the digital divide or the politics of (in)visiblity, in contrast to issues that are related to the power dynamics within the online itself. The issues that will be discussed are the lack of democratic leadership, the lack of self-organisation in virtual communities, the disconnection of the online from other spheres and the use of the online by undemocratic (or anti-democratic) movements.

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Nico Carpentier is Professor in Media and Communication Studies at the Department of Informatics and Media of Uppsala University. In addition, he holds two part-time positions, those of Associate Professor at the Communication Studies Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB - Free University of Brussels) and Docent at Charles University in Prague. Moreover, he is a Research Fellow at the Cyprus University of Technology and Loughborough University. His latest book is The Discursive-Material Knot: Cyprus in Conflict and Community Media Participation (2017, Peter Lang, New York). He is also the curator of Respublika! A Cypriot Community Media Arts festival 2017 - 2018.

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Nicos Trimikliniotis (CY)

Peace journalism, partitions and potential for overcoming austerity-and- chauvinist citizenship in divided Cyprus: Drawing on Cyprus and South Africa This paper examines the potential for transcending the structures of differentiation, division and inequality (ethnic, racial, class, gender) in de facto divided Cyprus. The development of monitorial citizenship has been heralded as generating the potential for realising citizen’s journalism: it opens up new for sharing data and transforming knowledge allows for widening the scope for popular engagement in activism and struggles for peace, reconciliation as well as resistance to oppressive regimes and human rights abuses. By undercutting the mainstream and colluding media monitorial citizenship is transforming the reporting, investigation and the very nature of ‘professional’ journalism at large. This is particularly significant in racially/ethnically divided societies, war-torn or authoritarian austerity-ridden societies. In this context, the participation of intellectuals and artists in civic initiatives, social critiques and public demonstrations can place a crucial role in challenging the order of things and/or castigating abuses of those in power: we have witnessed in thousands of instances, from anti-fascism to struggles against apartheid or against dictatorships. Social media has radically transformed the game; by massively expanding the scope, generating thousands of plateaus and globalising the game. Yet, over the last few years we have also witnessed the flip- side of this: dangerous and other racist groups targeting activists, trade unionists and Leftists in Western/northern Europe, the USA, Russia, Turkey, India, China etc. Moreover, regime-directed surveillance and suppressing whistle-blowers, imposing automated systems of profiling populations for anti-terrorism and crime-prevention, utilising the technologies and social media are generating cyber-spheres of oppression, radicalisation and reactionary politics: from the infamous Trump Twits to the cyber-hatred of the far right groups. Taking this rather mixed balance sheet of the global contested spaces into account, this paper will focus on Cyprus and South Africa. Drawing on these two experiences in the kind of journalism closely connected to activism aiming for peace, reconciliation as well as advancing the rights of the communities for emancipation and resistance (workers, precariats, subaltern, migrants, women’s groups, oppressed groups etc.), this paper explores the potential and pitfalls of monitorial citizenship for transcending austerity-and- ethnic chauvinist citizenship in Cyprus.

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Nicos Trimikliniotis is Professor of Sociology and Social Sciences, at the School of Social Sciences, University of Nicosia. He heads the team of expert of Cyprus team for the Fundamental Rights Agency of the EU. He is also a practicing Barrister. He has researched on integration, citizenship, education, migration, racism, free movement of workers, EU law, discrimination and Labour Law. He is the National Expert for Cyprus for the European Labour Law Network. He is part of the international team on world deviance, which produced Gauging and Engaging Deviance 1600-2000, Tulika press (2014) and its’ sequel Scripts of Defiance (2017). Selection of Publications: Mobile Commons, Migrant Digitalities and the Right to the City, Pivot, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Beyond a Divided Cyprus: A State and Society in Transformation, Palgrave MacMillan, 2012; The Nation-State Dialectic and the State of Exception, Savalas, Athens, 2010; Rethinking the Free Movement of Workers: The European Challenges Ahead, Wolf Legal Publishers, Nijmegen, 2009.

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James Bridle (UK/GR)

The Electromagnetic Border Zone As new technologies are deployed along and across Europe’s increasingly hardened borders, the construction of identity and citizenship is starting to change. The border becomes a shifting zone of data, while a defensive digital architecture is erected alongside the walls and checkpoints. James Bridle’s work explores the electromagnetic border zone as it presents new challenges to mobility and justice, while opening up subversive and emancipatory possibilities.

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James Bridle is a British writer, artist, publisher and technologist currently based in Athens, Greece. His work covers the intersection of literature, culture and the network. As a journalist and essayist he has written for the Guardian, the White Review, Frieze, WIRED, ICON, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic, the New Stateman and many other publications, and between 2011 and 2015 wrote a regular column for the Observer newspaper on publishing and technology.

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Moderator: Corina Demetriou (CY)

Corina Demetriou is an independent legal researcher and for over 10 years the national expert for Cyprus of the European Network of Legal Experts in the non-discrimination field (equalitylaw.eu) She is the senior legal expert of the Cypriot FRANET team for the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (fra.europa.eu) and participates as a national expert in several transnational research projects on racism and discrimination, trafficking, the rights of the child, labour law, gender violence and immigration policies.

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Notes:

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Focusing on how such technologies impact identity and citizenship, digital labour and finance, State Machines joins five experienced partners Aksioma (SI), Drugo More (HR), Furtherfield (UK), Institute of Network Cultures (NL) and NeMe (CY) together with a range of artists, curators, theorists and audiences. State Machines insists on the need for new forms of expression and new artistic practices to address the most urgent questions of our time, and seeks to educate and empower the digital subjects of today to become active, engaged, and effective digital citizens of tomorrow.

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Support

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This project has been funded with the support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

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