This seminar questions the role of ‘political cultures’ when studying interactions between media and movements, which we provocatively identified as the ‘missing actor’. Current research on social movements and media technologies has been profoundly affected by techno-deterministic, positivist and ethnocentric analyses. This is to detriment of a thorough understanding of the complex relationship between political cultures, imagination and media/movements interactions.

The aim of this seminar is to shed light on this complexity through three different panels a) political imaginations in media/movements interactions b) extreme-right political cultures and media/movement interactions c) left-wing political cultures and media/movement interactions. Scholars and activists will be invited to explore culturally and context specific examples, and to create a space in which we can re-think the role of the political in contemporary research on activism when it comes to interactions between different types of media technologies and social movements.

Here you can find the final programme of the event and the abstracts of the papers and keynotes that will be presented at the seminar.

The Social Movements and Media Technologies: Present Challenges and Future Developments Seminar Series is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and jointly organised by the Centre for Global Media and Democracy (CGMD) at Goldsmiths University of London and the Centre on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS), Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence.