January 15, 2014: 14:00-16:00
Johanna Sumiala (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Youth Street Politics in the Media/on the Street
University of Westminster, Harrow campus, room A6.08
Registration at latest until Sunday, Jan 12, to [log in to unmask]
Abstract
In recent years, the issue of boundary has attracted considerable
interest among scholars of cultural and media geography, anthropology,
cultural studies, sociology and media studies (see e.g. Soja 2010;
Massey 2005; Dikec 2007; Fassin 2010). In this presentation I will
examine urban youth life from the perspective of crossing of different
physical, virtual and symbolic boundaries. To follow Malone’s (2002: 2)
insight: ”All boundaries, whether national, global or simply street
names on a road map are socially constructed. They are as much the
products of society as are other social relations that mark the
landscape. For this reason, boundaries matter. They construct our sense
of identity in the places we inhabit and they organize our social space
through geographies of power.”
The crossing of different boundaries has become a routinized practice of
everyday life for many young people. McLuhan’s famous idea on media as
an extension of man is truer than ever as young people connect
themselves to the surrounding realities and social worlds with camera
phones and Facebook postings. As urban city life has become increasingly
mediatized the meanings of geographical places and spaces have been seen
to diminish simultaneously when the online environments have gained new
significance (e.g. Baym & boyd 2012). Yet, how these geographical and
virtual realms are connected or separated and what kind of hierarchies
and power relations are created and maintained between these two scales
of spatialities in the everyday experiences of young people still
remains much under theorized, let alone empirically researched.
The goal of this presentation is to sketch the concept of ‘street
politics’ to better grasp the dynamics of constant crossings of
different boundaries in youth life. In this exercise of sketching street
politics, I will pay special attention to the intersection of local,
national, transnational and global dimensions of street and the media,
the role of the interface between the private and the public in the
street and the media and the contested interplay between the two as both
the embodied and the imagined. The theoretical approach to street
politics is complemented with empirical examples drawing on media and
street ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tower Hamlets London and
Malmi Helsinki. The research project Youth Street Politics in the Media
Age: Helsinki and London Compared is carried out in the University of
Helsinki, The Finnish Youth Research Society, UCL, in cooperation with
the Tampere University of Applied Sciences, The British Council, and The
Finnish Institute in London.
For more info, please visit: http://blogs.helsinki.fi/streetpolitics/
Bio:
Johanna Sumiala, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor in the Department of
Social Research/Media and Communication Studies at the University of
Helsinki, Finland, and a senior research fellow at the Helsinki
Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her main interests are media and social
theory, social media, media anthropology, virtual ethnography, ritual
theory, media and violence. Her studies have been published in both
English and Finnish. In addition to writing numerous articles for such
journals as Media, Culture & Society; M/C journal, Communication,
Culture & Critique; and Social Anthropology, she has co-edited and
contributed to several books, including Implications of the Sacred
(2006), Images and Communities (2007) and School Shootings: Mediatized
Violence in a Global Age (2012). Her most recent monograph, Media and
Ritual: Death, Community and Everyday Life, was published by Routledge
in 2012.
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