media anthropology – Philbu's Blog

Seminar: Digital Visuality & Popular Culture

2024/03/12 philbu No Comments

The course “Digital Visuality and Popular Culture” for the MA program CREOLE at the University of Vienna provides an overview about digital visuality as a key phenomenon of contemporary visual culture and its connection to popular culture. By working on ethnographic research projects, students explore the diversity of digital practices, their visual dimension and their meaning for popular cultural processes and phenomena.

Exhibition at Ars Electronica, Austria. (Photo by Philipp Budka)

With the advent of digital media and technologies, internet-based devices and services, mobile computing as well as software applications and social media platforms new opportunities and challenges have come to the forefront in the anthropological research of visual culture. Digital media technologies have become ubiquitous means of visual communication, interaction and representation. For anthropology it is of particular interest how people engage with digital media technologies and content, how “the digital” is embedded in everyday life and how it relates to different sociocultural phenomena.

One of these phenomena is popular culture: processes and practices related to the production, circulation and consumption of, for example, music, film, fashion and advertisements as well as the construction and mediation of celebrities. Moreover, popular culture is closely connected to other cultural phenomena such as fan culture, public culture and participatory culture. Fans, for instance, engage in various forms of visual productivity and play a crucial role in the creation and circulation of cultural artifacts related to their fandom such as memes.

By working on different case studies, students get a comparative overview about digital visuality and visual aspects of popular culture. Students conduct ethnographic projects and engage with key questions. What theoretical concepts and analytical categories of sociality can be used to study visual and popular culture? How does digital visuality constitute and mediate cultural performances and rituals? How do social media platforms enable and change visual culture and communication? The university’s online learning management system is used to provide resources and content as well as to foster student’s exchange and communication beyond the classroom.

Selected Literature (reading list will be provided in 1st class)

Budka, P., & Bräuchler, B. (eds.). (2020). Theorising media and conflict. Berghahn.
Costa, E., et al. (eds.). (2022). The Routledge companion to media anthropology. Routledge.
Fabian, J. (1998). Moments of freedom: Anthropology and popular culture. University Press of Virginia.
Favero, P. (2018). The present image: Visible stories in a digital habitat. Palgrave Macmillan.
Gómez Cruz, E., et al. (eds.). (2017). Refiguring techniques in digital visual research. Palgrave Macmillan.
Jenkins, H. (2014). Rethinking “rethinking convergence/culture”. Cultural Studies, 28(2).
Miller, D., & Sinanan, J. (2017). Visualising Facebook: A comparative perspective. UCL Press.
Miller, D., et al. (2016). How the world changed social media. UCL Press.
Uimonen, P. (2015). Mourning Mandela: Sacred drama and digital visuality in Cape Town. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 7(1).

Paper: Media anthropology & the archives

2023/11/07 philbu No Comments

Budka, P. (2023). Media anthropology and the archives: On exploring and reconstructing sociotechnical life, histories, and biographies. Paper at EASA Media Anthropology Network Workshop: “Theorising Media and Time”, Copenhagen, Denmark: University of Copenhagen, November 9-10.

Screenshot of MyKnet.org records in the Internet Archive.

Abstract

This paper looks into digital archives and how they not only serve as facilities to collect, store, and categorize media content and artifacts, but how they mediate between the past and the present. How archives potentially contribute to the future projecting and envisioning of media as well as related technologies and practices. For that the paper explores the role of archival work in media anthropological research. It builds on material from my project on the Kuh-ke-nah Network (KO-KNET), an organization established by the tribal council Keewaytinook Okimakanak (KO) to connect remote First Nation communities in Canada’s Northwestern Ontario to the internet (e.g., Budka, 2019). I was particularly interested in exploring and reconstructing the sociotechnical life of the platform MyKnet.org (1998-2019), which was set up exclusively for First Nations people to create personal homepages within a cost- and commercial-free space on the web. By tracing the rise and fall of MyKnet.org, this paper adds to the steadily growing body of research into missing and marginalized internet histories (Driscoll & Paloque-Berges, 2017).

Besides considering historical and sociocultural contexts of First Nations’ life, it critically reviews theoretical accounts and conceptualizations of change and continuity that have been developed in an anthropology of media and technology (e.g., Pfaffenberger, 1992; Postill, 2017) as well as in postcolonial technoscience (e.g., Anderson, 2002). During fieldwork many people told me stories about their first MyKnet.org websites in the early 2000s, how they evolved, and what they meant to them. People vividly described how their homepages were designed, structured, and linked to other pages. To deepen my interpretation and understanding of these narratives, I used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to recover archived versions of these websites whenever possible. Thus, the Wayback Machine became an archaeological tool for my anthropological research into the sociotechnical life and history of MyKnet.org and the digital biographies of its users.

References

Anderson, W. (2002). Introduction: Postcolonial technoscience. Social Studies of Science, 32(5–6), 643–658.

Budka, P. (2019). Indigenous media technologies in “the digital age”: Cultural articulation, digital practices, and sociopolitical concepts. In S. S. Yu & M. D. Matsaganis (Eds.), Ethnic media in the digital age (pp. 162-172). New York: Routledge.

Driscoll, K., & Paloque-Berges, C. (2017). Searching for missing “net histories”. Internet Histories, 1(1–2), 47–59.

Pfaffenberger, B. (1992). Social anthropology of technology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, 491–516.

Postill, J. (2017). The diachronic ethnography of media: From social changing to actual social changes. Moment. Journal of Cultural Studies, 4(1), 19–43.

Seminar: Digital Visuality & Popular Culture

2023/03/08 philbu No Comments

The seminar “Digital Visuality and Popular Culture” for the MA program CREOLE at the University of Vienna provides an overview about digital visuality as a key phenomenon of contemporary visual culture and its connection to popular culture. By working on ethnographic research projects, students explore the diversity of digital practices, their visual dimension and their meaning for popular cultural processes and phenomena.

New in Paperback: Theorising Media & Conflict

2023/01/13 philbu No Comments

The edited volume Theorising Media and Conflict (Berghahn Books, 2020) is now available in paperback.
The volume’s introduction by Birgit Bräuchler and me remains openly accessible.

Abstract

The book brings together anthropologists as well as media and communication scholars to collectively address the elusive and complex relationship between media and conflict. Through epistemological and methodological reflections and the analyses of various case studies from around the globe, this volume provides evidence for the co-constitutiveness of media and conflict and contributes to their consolidation as a distinct area of scholarship.

Article: The materiality of mediated conflict & resistance

2022/02/04 philbu No Comments

Budka, P., & Bräuchler, B. (2022). The materiality of mediated conflict and resistance. In Media Res: A Media Commons Project – Theme Week “Critical Media Forensics”, 11 Feb.

Introduction

In our digital age the notion of media forensics evokes two ideas.

One is the material nature of media, the physicality of technologies and infrastructure that enable the mediation of communication across vast distances and at enormous speeds.
And one is how digital technologies are becoming increasingly important in the witnessing, investigation and countering of human rights violations. The intricate relationship between the two is crucial, but often overlooked.

In Media Res: A Media Commons Project – Theme Week “Critical Media Forensics”

Paper: Anthropologies of sociotechnical mediation in Austria

2021/10/16 philbu No Comments

Budka, P. (2021). Anthropologies of sociotechnical mediation in Austria. Paper at EASA Media Anthropology Network Workshop: “Media Anthropologies in Europe”, Online (hosted by European Association of Social Anthropologists), 14-15 October.
Co-organization of EASA Media Anthropology Network Workshop “Media Anthropologies in Europe”, 14-15 October.

Abstract

EASA Media Anthropology Network Workshop “Media Anthropologies in Europe”

This paper discusses aspects of the development and the current situation of “media anthropology”, as an anthropology of digital media technologies, in Austria. Since the 1990s, Austrian sociocultural anthropologists have been exploring new forms of media communication, digitally mediated practices of sociality as well as emerging sociotechnical systems and environments (Budka & Kremser, 2004).

While such engagements were then referred to as “cyber anthropology” or the “anthropology of cyberculture” to indicate connections to new sociocultural spaces related to the Internet, the World Wide Web and digital media technologies, they can also be conceptualised as anthropologies of sociotechnical mediation. It is through constantly changing technologies that communication, culture and sociality are mediated. As already early media anthropologists emphasised, this technical and material dimension of media cannot be neglected (e.g. Ginsburg et al., 2002).

Anthropologies of sociotechnical mediation in German-speaking countries like Austria are, however, not necessarily tied to sociocultural anthropology as empirical social science. Due to well established traditions of philosophical anthropology, media related phenomena have also been investigated from a humanities perspective that does not build its theories upon empirical data generated through ethnographic fieldwork like in sociocultural anthropology.

As this paper argues, this has resulted, on the one hand, in a dynamic field of media anthropologies and several projects that are open, diverse and interdisciplinary by nature. On the other hand, this has also contributed to a weakening of the sociocultural anthropological position, e.g., in terms of academic visibility and research funding. Similar tendencies can also be observed in anthropological explorations of “the digital” in Austria; research that frequently runs under the new rubric of “digital anthropology”.

References

Budka, P., & Kremser, M. (2004). CyberAnthropology – anthropology of cyberculture. In S. Khittel, B. Plankensteiner & M. Six-Hohenbalken (Eds.), Contemporary issues in socio-cultural anthropology: Perspectives and research activities from Austria (pp. 213-226). Vienna: Loecker Verlag.
Ginsburg, F., Abu-Lughod, L., & Larkin, B. (2002). Introduction. In F. Ginsburg, L. Abu-Lughod, & B. Larkin (Eds.), Media worlds: Anthropology on new terrain (pp. 1-36). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Reviews: Theorising Media & Conflict

2021/03/30 philbu No Comments

This post compiles extracts of published reviews of the edited volume Theorising Media & Conflict (eds. P. Budka & B. Bräuchler, Berghahn Books, 2020).

Younes Saramifar (Free University Amsterdam) notes in the journal Media, War & Conflict…

The editors upend the conventional and normative approaches limited to discourse, visual, content, reportage or policy analysis through anthropological analysis and ethnographically rooted methodologies. By way of telling ethnographic narratives and edited via a thorough theoretical inventory of current debates, the authors argue that a non-media-centric approach traces how the complexities of media technologies, sensory perceptions and social life are interrelated (p. 9). In other words, this volume encourages scholars and media researchers to think about how media becomes social and how it produces the social fabric of conflict.

They [the editors] have broadened the notion of conflict beyond the limits of contentious clashes and push readers to see conflict through lived experiences and everyday encounters. They aptly show how articulations and representations of conflicts in the news or other media platforms differ from witnessing and experiencing conflict.

There are wonderful ideas and reminders across the book hidden like Easter eggs, making reading a theory-driven academic volume a jubilant experience.

Overall, Theorising Media and Conflict is a promising and path-opening contribution to media and conflict debates which have ignored conflict ethnographies and interdisciplinary conversations for too long. This volume is a welcome addition to security and war studies, communication, journalism and social sciences at large. All students who wonder how to study conflict without coming under fire could highly benefit from this book.

Saramifar, Y. (2021). [Review of the book Theorising media and conflict, by P. Budka & B. Bräuchler]. Media, War & Conflict. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352211004012

Christine Crone (University of Copenhagen) comments in the Global Media Journal…

The book urges us to acknowledge the importance of ethnographic methods if we are to understand the integration and mutual constitutive power of media and conflict in the twenty-first century. Rather than looking at media and conflict as two separate spheres, the overall aim is to investigate media-related everyday practices in contexts of conflict as social processes.

Half of the contributions are made up of anthropologically informed media research and the other half consists of qualitative media and communication research and thus attempts through its structure to establish a dialogue between the two traditions on how to study media and conflict. This approach allows for new and inspiring ethnographic material that offers an insight into everyday media practices of people who live and navigate in this decade-long conflict while new media technologies change the ways of communication.

The volume brings new perspectives to the table and helps us move our attention from quantitative evaluations of the role of media in conflicts to the everyday media practices in conflict areas. This sets us free to investigate the fascinating interlinking and interplay between the two – or rather to dissolve what seems to have become an artificial division of one coherent phenomenon. The book is an ethnographic contribution to the study of media and conflict, adding qualitative research to a field where quantitative studies traditionally have dominated.

Crone, C. (2021). [Review of the book Theorising media and conflict, by P. Budka & B. Bräuchler]. Global Media Journal. http://globalmediajournal.de/en/2021/02/16/rezension-theorising-media-and-conflict/

Interview: Theorising Media & Conflict

2021/03/14 philbu No Comments

In an interview for the University of Vienna’s Uni:view Magazin, I am talking about the edited volume Theorising Media and Conflict (Berghahn Books, 2020), its purpose, conclusions and significance for understanding recent crises (in German).

Theorising Media and Conflict brings together anthropologists as well as media and communication scholars to collectively address the elusive and complex relationship between media and conflict. Through epistemological and methodological reflections and the analyses of various case studies from around the globe, this volume provides evidence for the co-constitutiveness of media and conflict and contributes to their consolidation as a distinct area of scholarship.

The book’s introduction is accessible for free:
Bräuchler, B., & Budka, P. (2020). Anthropological perspectives on theorising media and conflict. In P. Budka & B. Bräuchler (Eds.), Theorising media and conflict (pp. 3-31). Anthropology of Media. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Films & videos on media activism & more

2020/06/30 philbu No Comments

This is a selection of films and videos on mediated activism, anthropological perspectives on media and culture, and globalization and (de)colonization in relation to media.
Compiled by Philipp Budka with the generous support of colleagues of the EASA Media Anthropology Network and the EASA Visual Anthropology Network.

Al Jazeera (2017). Podemos vs the Spanish Media. (10.27 min.). https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2017/04/podemos-spanish-media-170429123101624.html (openly available)

Balmès, T. (2014). Happiness. (80 min.). https://thomasbalmes.com/happiness/ (not openly available)

Bardet, S. et al. (212). The Himbas are Shooting!. (52 min.). https://www.association-kovahimba.net/en/maps/50-bande-annonce/trailer/70-les-himbas-font-leur-cinema-6 (not openly available)

Bishop, J., & Prins, H. (2003). Oh, what a blow that phantom gave me! (52 min.). https://search.alexanderstreet.com/preview/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cvideo_work%7C1876691 (not openly available)

Cavallone, E. (2016). Media & conflicts: Dangerous liaisons, an INFOCORE study reveals. (8 min.). https://www.euronews.com/2016/11/21/media-conflicts-dangerous-liaisons-an-infocore-study-reveals (openly available)

CBC News: The National (2012). Idle No More. (2.39 min.). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpBdZtwH_xc (openly available)

Book: Theorising Media and Conflict

2020/02/19 philbu No Comments

Budka, P., & Bräuchler, B. (Eds.). (2020). Theorising media and conflict. Anthropology of Media. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Theorising Media and Conflict brings together anthropologists as well as media and communication scholars to collectively address the elusive and complex relationship between media and conflict. Through epistemological and methodological reflections and the analyses of various case studies from around the globe, this volume provides evidence for the co-constitutiveness of media and conflict and contributes to their consolidation as a distinct area of scholarship. Practitioners, policymakers, students and scholars who wish to understand the lived realities and dynamics of contemporary conflicts will find this book invaluable.

This is the second “Theorising media and …” book in Berghahn’s Anthropology of Media series. The aim of the series is to place media anthropology at the forefront of theoretical advances in both anthropology and media and communication studies.

Table of Contents

Preface
Philipp Budka

PART I: KEY DEBATES
Introduction. Anthropological Perspectives on Theorising Media and Conflict
Birgit Bräuchler and Philipp Budka
Chapter 1. Transforming Media and Conflict Research
Nicole Stremlau

PART II: WITNESSING CONFLICT
Chapter 2. Just a ‘Stupid Reflex’? Digital Witnessing of the Charlie Hebdo Attacks and the Mediation of Conflict
Johanna Sumiala, Minttu Tikka and Katja Valaskivi
Chapter 3. The Ambivalent Aesthetics and Perception of Mobile Phone Videos: A (De-)Escalating Factor for the Syrian Conflict
Mareike Meis

CfP: Engaged media anthropology in the digital age

2019/12/04 philbu No Comments

The EASA Media Anthropology Network is organizing an official network panel at the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) 2020 conference in Lisbon (21-24 July). Find the call for papers below and online:
https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/easa2020/p/8591

For more general information about the call and the conference, navigate to:
https://easaonline.org/conferences/easa2020/cfp
https://easaonline.org/conferences/easa2020/

The call closes on 20 January 2020.

Engaged media anthropology in the digital age

Organizers
Philipp Budka (University of Vienna) and Sahana Udupa (LMU Munich)

Abstract
The relative ease of access and potential disruptive features of digital media have opened up new opportunities for media anthropologists to extend their field relations into durable public engagement. These possibilities have encouraged anthropologists to collaboratively design various public engagement initiatives to harness digital media technologies and infrastructures for social justice goals including health, education, environmental protection, gender parity and political inclusion. Such direct interventions have gone hand in hand with critical perspectives on how “the digital” has played a key role in enabling political cultures of indignity and injustice – from online extreme speech to digitally enabled surveillance and algorithmic bias. This panel will foreground these two distinct, yet interrelated, aspects of engaged media anthropology: community projects that involve direct participation of anthropologists in designing digital platforms and applications, and in supporting local forms of media/digital activism; and studies that envision an inclusive future through public intervention strategies of critique and discursive resistance. A key question that drives this panel is whether the latest examples of engaged media anthropology that are enabled by digital technologies and infrastructures have signaled a break from the imperial logic of upliftment and betterment as a means to consolidate colonial power or whether enduring injustices are questioned through new means of collaboration and dialogue. What are the promises and limitations of engaged media anthropology in the digital age?

Seminar: Media Activism

2019/05/09 philbu No Comments

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OccupyHandSignals.pdf

For the MA Program “Visual and Media Anthropology” at the Free University Berlin, I am organizing a newly developed seminar on media activism.

Course Description

Activism with/in/through media can be broadly understood as forms of technology mediated activism that intend to spark, create and/or support social and political change. So change (and therefore continuity) is at the heart of media activism, as, for instance, Kidd and Rodriguez (2009: 1) note: “Grassroots media have grown from a set of small and isolated experiments to a complex of networks of participatory communications that are integral to local, national, and transnational projects of social change”. Since media activism is related to a diversity of phenomena – such as power relationships, conflict or globalization – as well as to questions about the conception of time and space, organizational structures, collective identities and different forms of sociality, it has become a broad, interdisciplinary research field. This course gives an overview of media activism from a predominantly anthropological and ethnographic perspective.

When engaging with media activism, a variety of contexts, theoretical conceptualizations and methodological approaches have to be considered. In this course, students learn about these aspects by reviewing relevant literature and by discussing different forms and examples of media activism and related questions, issues and problems:

How can we contextualize media activism and related practices in anthropology?
What historical developments can we identify? And what does this tell us about contemporary activist processes and practices?
What is the role of (sociocultural and technological) change, politics, power, globalization and (de)colonization in an anthropological engagement with media activism?
How can we ethnographically describe and analyze media activist processes and practices? What are the possibilities and challenges?
How can we understand media activism in digital times and in the age of social media? What has changed?
What does it mean to interpret and conceptualize media activism as (a form or a part of) cultural activism?

Reference

Kidd, D., & Rodriguez, C. (2009). Introduction. In C. Rodriguez, D. Kidd, & L. Stein (Eds.), Making our media: Global initiatives toward a democratic public sphere, Volume 1: Creating new communication spaces (pp. 1-22). New York: Hampton Press.

Article: Indigenous Media Technologies in “The Digital Age”

2019/03/19 philbu No Comments

Introduction
Indigenous engagements with digital media technologies have been analyzed from different angles and by discussing a variety of issues, from technology access and literacy, to language, culture, and politics (e.g., Dyson, Grant, & Hendriks, 2016; Dyson, Hendriks, & Grant, 2007; Landzelius, 2006a). By drawing on a literature review and on an ethnographic case study, I am providing an anthropological perspective on the relationship between indigenous people and digital media technologies that focuses on digital practices related to the mediation of culture and the formation of (cultural) identity. Within this mediation process, cultural elements of the dominant, non-indigenous societies are recombined with elements from indigenous cultures. “Indigenized” media technologies promote thus an open and dynamic understanding of culture in “the digital age.” But when it comes to characterizing and understanding non-Western media phenomena and processes, terms such as “the digital age” or “the network society” have their conceptual weaknesses. These concepts are inherently ethnocentric, that is, Euro-American centered, implying an evolutionary world view that tends to ignore culturally different ascriptions of meaning to digital realities. I am following here Ginsburg (2008), who states that these concepts are rather reinforcing the imaginary of “the other,” existing in “a time not contemporary with our own” (p. 291). Thus, this chapter presents an anthropologically informed approach to the relationship between media technologies, culture, and politics that advocates the significance of non-Western perspectives and realities in conceptualizing and understanding the diversity of digital life.

E-Seminar: The digital turn: New directions in media anthropology

2018/10/15 philbu No Comments

Udupa, S., Costa, E., & Budka, P. (2018) The digital turn: New directions in media anthropology.
Discussion Paper for the Follow-Up E-Seminar on the EASA Media Anthropology Network Panel “The Digital Turn” at the 15th European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Biennial Conference, Stockholm, Sweden, 14-17 August 2018.

63rd EASA Media Anthropology Network E-Seminar: 16-30 October 2018, via the network’s Mailing List.

With the advent of digital media technologies, internet-based devices and services, mobile computing as well as software applications and digital platforms new opportunities and challenges have come to the forefront in the anthropological study of media. For media anthropology and related fields, such as digital and visual anthropology, it is of particular interest how people engage with digital media and technologies; how digital devices and tools are integrated and embedded in everyday life; and how they are entangled with different social practices and cultural processes. The digital turn in media anthropology signals the growing importance of digital media technologies in contemporary sociocultural, political and economic processes. This panel suggested that the digital turn could be seen a paradigm shift in the anthropological study of media, and foregrounded three important streams of exploration that might indicate new directions in the anthropology of media.

More (PDF)

Panel: “Digital Visuality” @ VANDA 2018

2018/07/30 philbu No Comments

PANEL “DIGITAL VISUALITY” @ Vienna Anthropology Days (VANDA) 2018 (September 19-22, 2018)

Convenors:
Elke Mader & Philipp Budka

Thursday, 20 September
11:00-17:00
Room 4 (New Institute Building (NIG) of the University of Vienna, Universitätsstraße 7)

Paper Presentations:
(Timetable)

Philipp Budka: The Anthropology of Digital Visuality: Notes on Comparison, Context and Relationality

Harjant Gill: Introduction to Multimodal Anthropologies

Petr Nuska: “Changing the Equipment or Changing the Perspective?” – Exploring Film and Video Approach in Visual Ethnography

Katja Müller: Contemporary Photography in India – Post-media Aesthetics, Traditional Art and Economic Professionalism

Uschi Klein: What Does a Photograph Really Tell Us? The Photography of Young Male Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Fatma Sagir: “We Can See Your Hair, Dina!” – Muslim Female Embodiments of Digital Visibilities

Nadia Molek: Argentinian Slovenians Online: Facebook Groups of Slovenian Descendants in Argentina as Mediators of Identity Performances and Rituals
(via Skype)

Daria Radchenko: Digital Anthropology and/or Digital Traces: Seeing the City Through the Eyes of Locals

Elke Mader: Mediating the Krampus: Digital Visuality, Ritual and Cultural Performance

VANDA 2018 Full Program

Primary Sidebar