Danger, comfort, and silence at the home front: Mediating soldiers’ wives

This article explores how the experiences of soldiers’ wives are mediated in the context of militarised popular culture and following two ultimately unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We show how audiences, representation (in two senses) and gender matter in a qualitative research project with soldiers, soldiers’ wives and veterans, which explores their perceptions of contemporary media representations of British soldiering, and their social media use. In the summer of 2014, we interviewed 31 participants in 5 focus groups for a British Academy funded project. Participants were veterans, veteran support groups, family members (all ‘wives’) and those directly involved with the promotion of the armed forces in various media (the Joint Information Activities Group, Media Operations Team). The focus groups explored media representations of contemporary soldiering across a range of media and genres (TV documentaries, reality TV, drama, newspapers) but also social media use – practices of self-representation. In this article, we focus on interview data from the wives’ groups (as they identify themselves) and find four emergent and overlapping themes: ridicule, comfort, danger and silence. We argue that the mediation of soldier’s wives is an area of pronounced contradiction: one that is important in and of itself for what it tells us about the experience of that group of women and equally important for what it tells us about representation, practice and gender and the ways in which these are entwined in digital culture

Researching Local News in a Big City: A Multimethod Approach

Reflecting on recent research in the United Kingdom, we consider how to investigate the mediation of news in a contemporary city. We put forward the notion of a “media ecology” to capture the relationships between varied news media and practices—from mainstream news media and community media to the everyday circulation of news through local grapevines—and to explore how individuals and groups relate to the city and to one another. We outline the methodological challenges and decisions we faced in mapping such a complex thing as a media ecology and then in seeking to describe how it operates and to explain the difference it makes to the lives of city dwellers. We advocate the use of multiple methods because none could have provided an adequate explanation of the media ecology or the mediation of news in the city on its own

Public Engagement & Cultures of Expertise Scoping Report

This scoping project investigated public, civic and cultural engagement using Leeds as a case study for a wider snapshot of British culture and practices. The scope is broken into three sections. The first looks at formal modes of engagement such as consultation and the power relations of institutions and their publics. The second investigates data itself and the claims made on behalf of digital content in the name of engagement. The third investigates everyday practices of engagement from the perspective of community groups. What is engagement in a digital environment and what does it look like? What new modes and practices of engagement are emerging, and what kinds of cultural products result? What are the implications of these new forms of engagement and new cultural products for communities and cultures

Investigating situated cultural practices through cross-sectoral digital collaborations: policies, processes, insights

The (Belfast) Good Friday Agreement represents a major milestone in Northern Ireland's recent political history, with complex conditions allowing for formation of a ‘cross-community’ system of government enabling power sharing between parties representing Protestant/loyalist and Catholic/nationalist constituencies. This article examines the apparent flourishing of community-focused digital practices over the subsequent ‘post-conflict’ decade, galvanised by Northern Irish and EU policy initiatives armed with consolidating the peace process. Numerous digital heritage and storytelling projects have been catalysed within programmes aiming to foster social processes, community cohesion and cross-community exchange. The article outlines two projects—‘digital memory boxes’ and ‘interactive galleon’—developed during 2007–2008 within practice-led PhD enquiry conducted in collaboration with the Nerve Centre, a third-sector media education organisation. The article goes on to critically examine the processes involved in practically realising, and creatively and theoretically reconciling, community-engaged digital production in a particular socio-political context of academic-community collaboration

Personal Media

In critical scholarship, personal media tend to refer to media technologies and their uses by individuals rather than to institutions or companies. Critical research on personal media taken cumulatively shows how personal media are embedded in relations and discourses of power, in relations to authorities, in relations to peers, and in relations between groups (digital natives vs. other groups), and how they are important to citizenship. Moreover, personal media do not refer only to individual technologies and their use but are also, by definition, about sociability and the embeddedness of individual use in networks of various kinds. In short, critical scholarship on personal media finds them to have far-reaching positive and negative implications, entwined with other kinds of influences and factors—social, political, economic, and cultural