When we are told so regularly that we live in a ‘post truth’ age and are surrounded by ‘fake news’, it can be tempting to think of politics as primarily mediated. Discussion and analysis of public affairs is preoccupied with the power and reach of platforms or the passion and rage of social media exchanges. As important as these issues may be, a focus on the communicative risks downgrading the political.
Media, Democracy and Social Change puts politics back into political communications. It shows how within a digital media ecology, the wider context of neoliberal capitalism remains essential for understanding what political communications is, and can hope to be.
Tackling broad themes of structural inequality, technological change, political realignment and social transformation, the book explores political communications as it relates to debates around the state, infrastructures, elites, populism, political parties, activism, the legacies of colonialism, and more.
It is both an expert introduction to the field of political communications, and a critical intervention to help re-imagine what a democratic politics might mean in a digital age. It will be essential reading for students, researchers and activists.
Aeron Davis, Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman and Gholam Khiabany all work at the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London, where they teach together on the MA in Political Communications.
Table of Content
Chapter 1. Putting Politics Back Into Political Communications
Chapter 2. Infrastructures of Political Communications
Chapter 3. The State of Political Communications
Chapter 4. Elites, Experts, Power and Democracy
Chapter 5. Democracy without Political Parties?
Chapter 6. The Violence of an Illiberal Liberalism
Chapter 7. Political Communications, Civil Society and the Commons
Chapter 8. Intellectuals and the Re-imagining of Political Communications
About the author
Gholam Khiabany teaches in the Department of Media, Communication and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a member of council of management of the Institute of Race Relations, and Editorial Working Committee of Race and Class. His publications include Iranian Media: The Paradox of Modernity (Routledge, 2010); Blogistan co-authored with Annabelle Sreberny (I.B.Tauris, 2010); and two co-edited collections: Liberalism in Neoliberal Times: Dimensions, Contradictions, Limits (Goldsmiths Press, 2017), and After Charlie Hebdo: Terror, Racism and Free Speech (Zed, 2017).
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