Non-media-centric media studies: A Cross-generational conversation

On the face of it, the notion of non-media-centric media studies appears to be a contradiction in terms. Surely those who are working in media studies will put media at the centre of their investigations and explanations of social life? In the following conversation, three advocates of a non-media-centric approach discuss their ways into the field of media studies at different points in its development, and together they explore their overlapping empirical research interests as well as their theoretical, methodological and pedagogical concerns. Topics that feature in this exchange include the linked mobilities of information, people and commodities, the articulation of material and virtual geographies, and the meaningfulness of everyday, embodied practices. Out of the dialogue emerges a renewed call for media studies that acknowledge the particularities of media, but which are about more than simply studying media and which seek to recover the field’s early spirit of interdisciplinary adventure

Leisure activism and engaged ethnography: heterogeneous voices and the urban palimpsest

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Studying the conflictualities between leisure activism, understood as participation in events of dissent as a nonwork-based activity, and those tasked with ‘maintaining order’, requires techniques that can work with diverse voices and contesting world views. However, many of the methods familiar to us in the social sciences risk reinforcing relationships of power that can undermine such inquiry. Drawing on the conceptual work of scholars from the global south and the global north, we examine approaches to protests as event, the construction of urban space and the performativity of violence, in two democracies: Brazil and the UK. From that we were led to conclude such research requires a less canonical approach. It is through the adoption of a more engaged ethnography, one that establishes horizontal relations between researchers and participants that are drawn from backgrounds reflecting such conflictualities, combined with an understanding of the process of research as more like that of an event, that the diversity of the heterogeneous voices associated with dissent, within an urban palimpsest, can be heard