The elasticity of the public sphere: Expansion, contraction and 'other' media

This book focuses on the surprising generative possibilities which digital and smart technologies offer media consumers, citizens, institutions and governments in making publics and places, across topics as diverse as Twitter audiences, ...John Budaric

Belonging-security across borders: news media, migration and the spaces of production

This article analyzes the relationship between migrants, news media, and feelings of belonging and security. It comparatively examines the role of news media produced in three distinct yet overlapping sociopolitical spheres—Australia, Iran, and the Iranian diaspora—in the management of “belonging-security” among Iranian migrants in Australia. The article investigates the experiences of Iranian Australians as they manage shifting understandings of identity, home, and community, all while engaging with a complex media environment that addresses multiple audiences and facilitates multiple overlapping communities. The findings demonstrate that participants apply their own evaluative frameworks onto media in an attempt to manage feelings of belonging-security and negotiate cultural and political borders.John Budaric

Ethnic minority media and the public sphere: the case of African-Australian media producers

Published online before print September 5, 2016,This article analyses the work of ethnic minority media producers through a series of 13 indepth interviews with African-Australian broadcasters, writers and producers. Focusing on the aims and motivations of participants, the article demonstrates a more expansive role for African-Australian media, one that brings niche media products into dialogue with mainstream Australian public life and challenges common understandings of ethnic media as appealing to a small, linguistically and culturally defined audience. Such a role also raises questions around wider conceptual understandings of the public sphere, particularly as it is employed to interrogate minority–majority relations. The article concludes by engaging with previous literature focused on the changing contours of the public sphere ideal in multi-ethnic and multicultural societies.John Budaric

Media narratives and social events: the story of the Redfern riot

This article uses a narrative framework to analyze the role of newspapers in discursively reestablishing social order during times of social crisis and upheaval. Using the coverage by three diverse newspapers (Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Telegraph, and Koori Mail) of the 2004 Redfern Riot in Sydney, Australia, the article will explicate the way each paper narrates social actors, discourses, and events in order to make sense of the riot and promote a way to reestablish social equilibrium. It is argued that the narratives of the two mainstream papers (Sydney Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph) converge in a coverage that draws on powerful cultural tropes of race and crime in Redfern to explain the riot. The Indigenous owned and run Koori Mail, in challenging many of those same tropes, is left with fewer publicly available narrative resources through which to conclude its story of the riot.John Budaric

From marginalisation to a 'voice of our own': African media in Australia

Budarick analyses the work of African-Australian media producers working in the ethnic minority, community and public service media sectors in Australia through the mediums of print, broadcast and the Internet. Based on a thematic analysis of 14 in-depth interviews with black African journalists, writers and broadcasters in Australia, the chapter examines ways in which interviewees discuss and explain their media work, including their motivations, their aims and the role they see their media playing in Australian society. The findings of the study are placed within a historical context of ethnic media production in Australia and internationally in a way that teases out themes of integration, multiculturalism, self-representation and identity politics. The chapter will demonstrate the way in which participants’ media work is contextualised by experiences of structural inequality, marginalisation from the communicative environment and a desire to provide a ‘voice of our own’ to an African, and wider Australian, audience.John Budarick, Gil-Soo Ha

Media and the limits of transnational solidarity: unanswered questions in the relationship between diaspora, communication and community

In this article, I critically analyse the relationship between media and conceptualisations of diaspora as a form of imagined transnational community. Despite the central place of transnational media in understandings of diasporic communities, there is yet to be a sustained dialogue between theoretical understandings of diaspora and diaspora media studies. I argue that the role of transnational media in conceptualisations of diaspora is too often reduced to the facilitation of cross-border communities. Not enough attention is paid to the alternative possibilities, including the potential of media to challenge cross-border solidarities in ways that fundamentally undermine prevalent understandings of the media and diaspora relationship. As a way to address this issue, it is important that studies of diaspora and media incorporate non-diasporic media into their analyses.John Budaric

A re-evaluation of literature in active and critical audience studies

John Budaric

Media, Home and Diaspora

This paper investigates the role of Australian media in feelings of home and belonging amongst the Iranian-Australian diaspora. Drawing on data from in depth interviews, the paper argues that the ‘local’ and broadcast media of the country of settlement can play the dual role of encouraging feelings of belonging and not belonging in the wider Australian society for Iranian-Australians. This duality highlights the media’s role beyond mere representation, and extends to the way media is used by consumers in order to negotiate their social surroundings. The article begins by discussing the meaning and role of ‘home’ in studies of media and diaspora, whereby it is emphasised that home is something made and desired. Then, the way local and broadcast media is used in the essay is defined, and the possibility of media use leading to feelings of both belonging and not belonging is discussed. Finally, feelings of home and belonging amongst Iranian Australians are analysed by drawing on a series of in depth interviews with Iranians on their media use.John Budaric

Localised audiences and transnational media: media use by Iranian-Australians

This article investigates the ways in which Iranian-Australians engage with Iranian state and diasporic media. Through a series of in-depth interviews, the article analyses the social, geographical and political factors that influence the use of Iranian media. While media have an important role to play among Iranians in Australia, the diverse nature of the audience, as well as the continuing importance of the political, social and cultural space of media production and consumption, must be taken into account. Participants in this study have an ambivalent relationship with Iranian media, with media produced in Iran, Australia and by the diaspora approached in different ways.John Budaric

Towards a multi-ethnic public sphere? African-Australian media and minority-majority relations

The potential connections between minority ethnic media producers and the majority ethnic group in multicultural societies have received little academic attention. As a result, important questions regarding the role of ethnic minority media beyond their specialised audiences have remained largely unanswered. In this article, we draw upon a series of interviews with African-Australian media producers in Melbourne and interrogate the relationship between ethnic minority media and the broader Australian public sphere. Drawing on Husband’s notion of the multi-ethnic public sphere as an ideal-type model, we analyse the explicit and implicit attempts by African-Australian broadcasters and media producers to communicate across communities and to positively impact the practices and understandings of White Australian journalists and audiences.John Budarick, Gil-Soo Ha