6-7 October 2012 Rooms G2 and G3, Main BuildingSchool of Oriental and African Studies University of London, Thornhaugh StreetRussell Square, London WC1H 0XG

The Small Media Initiative would like to thank its partners for their kind support

Centre for Media and Film Studies, School of Arts, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

The Rethinking small media conference is possible thanks to a research grant from the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and the financial support of Index on Censorship, through its publishers SAGE and the DOEN Foundation.

Design and artwork: Brett Biedscheid (statetostate.co.uk)

Welcome The Small Media Initiative is pleased to welcome you to its second conference, Rethinking small media.

Much has been happening in the terrain of small media and political change, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movements and more, and much has already been written and discussed. We want to use this event to think with, and through, unanswered questions and perhaps pose some more.

In the debates about the potential for digital connectivity and new media to enhance or alter politics, the debates appear frozen around immovable binaries, such as:

theory versus practicesmall versus big mediaspace versus placechange versus continuityold/new social movements versus new/old social movementscontrol versus circumvention

Given their longevity, perhaps these binaries are significant, but we neither expect to erase nor to resolve them. Instead we aim to explore why they are so intractable and focus on the issues they raise, helping us to define and perhaps better answer the important questions of the day:

• What are the specific affordances of face-to-face politics and of new media politics and how/when can they complement each other?

• What are the characteristics of old social movements and the new; what might each learn from the other and which are most successful at achieving their aims?

• How are small media echoed and elaborated by big media, and how can their inter-relationships be fostered?

• What kinds of regimes of control are currently operative and how can and do activists and publics circumvent the circumvenors?

These issues will be addressed by panellists who come from different regimes of practice (academe, journalism, activism, technology) and we invite everyone to join in the discussions over the next two days as we perhaps begin to rethink our understanding of media and politics.

Klara Chlupata (@klarachlupata)on behalf of the Small Media Initiative

Day 1

10:00 - 10:30 Registration + Breakfast provided

10:30 - 10:40 WelcomeDina Matar SOAS

10:40 - 11:00 Opening AddressAnnabelle Sreberny SOAS

11:00 - 13:00 Session One Affordances Chair Tim Jordan King’s College LondonSpeakers Joss Hands Anglia Ruskin UniversityPaolo Gerbaudo King’s College London

13:00 - 13:10 Lightning Talk The People’s Wall Janet Gunter rizominha.net

13:10 - 15:00 Networking + Lunch provided

15:00 - 15:10 Lightning Talk E-SyndicatAntonin Moulart Internet Sans Frontières

15:10 - 17:10 Session Two Controls Chair Gus Hosein Privacy InternationalSpeakers Oliver Leistert Universität PaderbornFederico “bomboclat” Prando autistici/inventati dot org

17:10 - 18:30 Magazine LaunchIndex on Censorship: Censors on Campus

17:10 WelcomeKirsty Hughes Index on Censorship

17:20 Drinks Reception Kindly sponsored by SAGE, publishers of Index on Censorship magazine

18:30 - 19:30 Film Screening

Don’t Cut My Head Off

Day 2

9:00 - 9:30Breakfast provided

9:30 - 11:30 Session Three MovementsChair Gillian Youngs University of BrightonSpeakers Anastasia Kavada University of WestminsterJérémie Bédard-Wien Coalition Large de l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante

11:30 - 12:30 Lunch provided

12:30 - 14:30 Session FourMedia Chair Sameer Padania Open Society Foundation-LondonSpeakers Pooneh Ghoddoosi BBCClaire UlrichGlobal Voices

14:30 - 14:45 Coffee/Tea

14:45 - 16:00 Session FiveCase Studies Chair Sameer PadaniaOpen Society Foundations-LondonSpeakers Jennifer JonesUniversity of the West of ScotlandNazek RamadanMigrant VoiceMatt McAlister Guardian Media GroupRohan Jayasekera Index on Censorship

16:00 Closing AddressSomnath BatabyalSOAS

Annabelle SrebernySchool of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)

I aim to explore the development of the notion of “small media”, for which I claim some responsibility, and its further elaboration into a panoply of terms that try to pin down the specific nature of non-commercial, non-state media (the big ones!). I unpack the presuppositions behind competing terms, how they feed into different theoretical paradigms and the conceptual thicket that still lies in front of us.

Annabelle Sreberny is Professor, Centre for Media and Film Studies, School of Arts, SOAS and immediate past president of the International Association for Media and Communication Research. Her research has focused primarily on the field of international communication and debates about globalisation with a specific focus on international news, questions of diaspora and with a strong feminist orientation. For over thirty years, her work on Iran has examined the nexus of politics and communications, from the process of the 1979 revolution (Small Media, Big Revolution) to the emergence of a contemporary dynamic Persian-language presence on the net (Blogistan).

@RussellSquared

Opening Address Small Media: the genealogy and evolution of a linguistic meme

Day 1

Session One Affordances

What are the specific affordances of face-to-face politics and of new media politics and how/when can they complement each other?

Chair: Tim JordanKing’s College London

Tim Jordan is a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London, leading development there of analysis of digital culture. He is a member of two departments, Culture, Media and Creative Industries and Digital Humanities. Tim has been involved in analysis of the social and cultural meaning of the internet and cyberspace since the mid-1990s. He has a book on the internet and communication called Internet, Culture and Society: communicative practices before and after the internet forthcoming in early 2012 with Continuum. He has also published the books Hacking: digital media and technological determinism (2008), Cyberpower (1999) and, with Paul Taylor, Hacktivism and Cyberwars (2004). He has also played a role in analysing social movements and popular protest with Activism!: direct action, hacktivism and the future of society (2002), as co-editor of Storming the Millennium (1999, with Adam Lent) and as a founding editor of the Taylor and Francis journal Social Movement Studies. In addition to his books on social movements and internet cultures, Tim has published on Pokemon, surfing and technology and social theory.

Day 1

Joss Hands Anglia Ruskin University

Much of today’s discourse around the power of networks and their “affordances”, in relation to recent political and social upheavals, examines only their practical uses and impact in a fairly journalistic way, particularly in the search for easy answers in the wake of the “Arab Spring” and other global events. One response, the extensive use of “big data”, risks taking us back to a kind of digital positivism, and doesn’t offer any kind of dialectical understanding of a digital “whole way of life” and the nuances of different technologies of communication.

Thus the question of what an affordance can be in that context will be discussed; primarily, how do we address the notion of a technological affordance as embedded in specific temporal, spatial and cultural coordinates? Can we understand a deeper network politics informing recent processes of digital activism? The concept of intention here is key, as is raised originally by Raymond Williams, and will be explored in the light of recent debates on new media activism.

Joss Hands is a senior lecturer in communication and media studies at Anglia Ruskin University. He is director of the Anglia Research Centre in Media and Culture and is author of @ is for Activism: Dissent Resistance and Rebellion in a Digital Culture, published by Pluto Press.

@josshands

Materialism and affordance: between cultural and new materialism in network politics

Day 1

Paolo Gerbaudo King’s College London

The recent protest wave, from the pro-democracy movements in the Arab World to the anti-capitalist protests of the indignados and Occupy in the West, has seen an intense use of social networking sites as a tool for protest mobilisation. The popularity of these practices has led some to a fetishisation of technology, seeing social media as a sort of magic wand, which alone could explain the success of mobilisations otherwise deprived of strong organisational and logistical structures. Drawing on ongoing research on contemporary protest movements in Europe, the US and Egypt, and on the findings of my forthcoming book Tweets and the Streets (Pluto, 2012), I argue that activist use of social media like Facebook and Twitter can only be understood in complementarity with (rather than in substitution of) those forms of emplaced and face-to-face interaction, from workplaces to neighbourhoods and cafeterias like the ones in Cairo, which have traditionally constituted (and continue to constitute) a crucial resource for protest mobilisation. Contemporary activists have chiefly used social media as a means to assemble these fragmented spheres of social cooperation and “friendship”, themselves increasingly colonised by social media practices, by invoking unifying identities and harnessing an emerging desire for face-to-face community.

Paolo Gerbaudo is a Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London and has previously worked at the American University in Cairo and at Middlesex University in London. He is interested in the role played by new media in the transformation of contemporary activism and youth cultures and has looked in a comparative perspective at their use in the West and in the Arab World, to identify commonalities and variations of contemporary digital cultures. His forthcoming book Tweets and the Streets, which looks at the “take the square” movements of 2011, argues that social media have been chiefly used by activists as a means to assemble highly diverse and spatially dispersed constituencies around unifying “popular” identities and symbolic places of gathering, but also points to the risks of isolation and evanescence which social media bring to the contemporary protest experience.

@paologerbaudo

Social media and the choreography of protest assembly

Day 1

Lightning Talks

Day 1

The People’s Wall in Maputo, Mozambique E-Syndicat@Verdade newspaper has its headquarters in the centre of Maputo, where readers go weekly on Fridays to pick up the only copies available in the city centre. (The rest are distributed for free to poorer peripheral neighbourhoods on Saturday morning.) The flux of foot traffic on Friday morning sparked the creation of a place for people to vent and communicate with the public using handwritten messages – the “People’s Wall”. The idea was inspired by three things: the work of Civic Center in New Orleans, the activity on the newspaper’s vibrant Facebook Wall, and something older – the socialist-era Jornal do Povo (or People’s Newspaper, a public bulletin board where news was shared). The “People’s Wall” was an instant hit with readers – from policemen to schoolchildren, they pour out their hearts in white chalk. @Verdade’s trademark is integration of communication platforms – so handwritten “posts” on the wall are published in the weekly print paper and shared online where they often generate further comment.

Janet Gunter (@janetgunter) has served as an adviser to @Verdade (verdade.co.mz / @verdademz) since October 2011 and can be found at rizominha.net.

E-Syndicat (e-syndicat.org) is an electronic union created by Internet Sans Frontières to defend the rights of contributors to online services. Despite the numerous concerns raised by institutions of the European Union, an appropriate legal framework protecting the data and rights of these contributors has yet to emerge. E-Syndicat is in contact with contributors, identifying instances of censorship, privacy violations and attacks on their rights. E-Syndicat acts as advocate in these cases and develops legal, media and organisational strategies to strengthen these rights. E-Syndicat denounced the censorship of French Twitter contributors during the 2012 French presidential election and called for mobilisation during the Facebook IPO, questioning the link between the valuation of this online service and its handling of contributors’ data.

Antonin Moulart (@antoninmoulart) is a community organiser, social media consultant and the Secretary General of Internet Sans Frontières (internetsansfrontieres.com / @internetlibre).

Session Two Controls

What kinds of regimes of control are currently operative and how can and do activists and publics circumvent the circumvenors?

Chair: Gus HoseinPrivacy International

Gus Hosein is the Executive Director of Privacy International. He has worked at the intersection of technology and human rights for over fifteen years. He has advised a number of governmental, international and civil society organisations and has held visiting positions at various academic institutions including the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has a PhD from the University of London and a B.Math from the University of Waterloo.

@privacyint

Day 1

Containing surveillance and control

Oliver Leistert Universität Paderborn

Since its academic-military childhood, control over the internet has been sought by governments and corporations. The brilliant architecture of decentralised nodes and open standards in conjunction with open source software prevented for a long time any attempt to seriously control the flow of bits. But for the past few years the air has been getting thinner. Technologies such as deep packet inspection or new repressive internet laws are blooming globally.

By way of massive data storage, sophisticated data mining procedures and our societies’ massive use of the internet, we are confronted with new powers and knowledge that can reconstruct and even foresee many of our activities and social relations with algorithmic precision – overwhelming both the surveillant parties and us.

There are many open questions and even questions we can not yet ask about this situation of ubiquitous mass surveillance in combination with mass use of the net. For activists it is

becoming more and more important not only to secure communication, but to think further: how can activists contain surveillance? What concepts are there to continue struggles in a digitally surveilled life?

Oliver Leistert is a lecturer in Media Studies at University Paderborn, Germany and a Research Fellow at Central European University, Budapest. He occasionally works as a consultant for human rights NGOs in the field of mobile media security for activism. His main research activities include mobile protest media, surveillance and media theory. In his doctoral thesis about mobile media in protest and surveillance, he examines the political rationality of ubiquitous individual connectivity. Together with Theo Röhle he has edited the German volume Generation Facebook (2011), which will be published in English in 2013.

Day 1

Federico “bomboclat” Prandoautistici/inventati dot org

autistici.org and inventati.org were two activist collectives born in Milan and Florence following the anti-globalisation movement that emerged in Seattle in 1999. They merged into a single project from the start to meet two principal needs: to provide technical infrastructure to the grassroots movements present at the time in Italy and to spread knowledge about hacking and the mediascape. Since 2001 we’ve been very careful about data protection and freedom of speech, providing many different tools over the years to achieve our goals. We’ve been recognized worldwide for our efforts by thousand of activists, anarchists, anti-fascists and feminists, from Brazil to Russia, we have survived seizures and trials. Escape from control, defense of freedom, sharing of knowledge and concrete means and practices towards these have always been our focus.

Federico “bomboclat” Prando discovered GNU/Linux, Free Software and hacker culture when studying political science at university. Since then, politics, copyleft and the internet have become the ingredients of his main activities as activist and squatter. He was co-founder in 1999 of the LOA hacklab in which autistici.org was born in 2001. He released with friends his own GNU/Linux distribution in 2003 (dynebolic.org). He has been part of the Indymedia Network since G8 2001 and has since then worked on communication in terms of media-activism (e.g. italy.indymedia.org), subvertising (e.g. Lacomune Dimilano 2010), mediatic hoaxes (e.g. Serpica Naro hoax at Milan Fashion Week 2005).

Grassroots movements in Italy: when hacking and politics meet to produce independent information

Day 1

Magazine Launch: Censors on CampusIndex on Censorship

Index on Censorship and the Small Media Initiative invite you to a drinks reception, kindly sponsored by SAGE, publishers of Index on Censorship magazine, to celebrate the launch of Censors on Campus, the latest issue of Index’s award-winning quarterly magazine. Censors on Campus assesses the challenges to academic freedom, from protest on campus in Turkey, Israel and Thailand to education cuts that threaten the pursuit of knowledge in UK universities.

We look at the open access debate, an issue dividing academic communities around the globe, new tactics to bring creationism into the classroom and the politics of research, from Northern Ireland to Iraq.

PLUS: As the Leveson Inquiry prepares to report on the culture and ethics of the press in the UK, Alan Rusbridger, Guido Fawkes and Trevor Kavanagh outline their hopes, fears and expectations.

International in outlook, outspoken in comment, award-winning magazine Index on Censorship is the only publication dedicated to freedom of expression. This year we mark 40 years of championing the right to speak out, from Cold War Europe to democratic change in Burma. To celebrate, our publisher SAGE is offering subscription discounts and access to much of Index’s remarkable historical archive.

For more information and to subscribe, please visit indexoncensorship.org

@IndexCensorship

Day 1

Film Screening: Don’t Cut My Head Off

A film by Somnath Batabyal, Matti Pohjonen, Kazimuddin Ahmed and Pradip Saha

Seno Tsuhah from Chizami village in Nagaland went to Copenhagen Climate Meet in 2009 and came back home disappointed. Don’t Cut My Head Off travels between Copenhagen and Chizami and captures the ‘disconnect’ between the reality of climate change and its articulation in hyper mediated spectacles like the United Nations’ Climate Meet. Seno represents a farming community that operates within the matrix of the natural world and she hoped that she would be able to offer climate negotiators some clues to manage the earth. Nobody listened. In the midst of hard bargaining between the world’s political elites, Seno or a drowning fisherman from Tuvalu became abstract notions. There is a Naga folksong. Two women walk through a forest to attend a friend’s wedding. But they have to negotiate with a headhunter inside the forest. Don’t Cut My Head Off is a story about the millions of people who have to negotiate with their killers for survival.

English (subtitled), 49 min, 2011, India

Day 1

Chair: Gillian Youngs University of Brighton

Gillian Youngs, Professor of Digital Economy, University of Brighton, has a background in the media, business and academia. Her interdisciplinary background covers international relations, media and communications and new media, and she has been researching different aspects of political economy and Internet developments for the past 15 years, including in relation to the war on terror. Her publications include International Relations in a Global Age (Polity, 1999), the edited volume Political Economy, Power and the Body (Macmillan, 2000), Global Political Economy in the Information Age (Routledge, 2007) and the co-edited volume Globalization: Theory and Practice 3rd ed. (Continuum, 2008). She is currently leading the ESRC research seminar series ‘Digital Policy: Connectivity, Creativity and Rights’ (2011-13) with Dr. Tracy Simmons, University of Leicester, Prof. William Dutton, Oxford Internet Institute, and Prof. Katharine Sarikakis, University of Vienna. Her current work also includes a volume on Virtual Globalization for Routledge.

Session Three Movements

What are the characteristics of old social movements and the new; what might each learn from the other and which are most successful at achieving their aims?

Day 2

Anastasia Kavada University of Westminster

Recent mobilisations, such as the Occupy movement, have raised new questions around the characteristics of current movements and their capacity for social change. They have also challenged the distinction between “old” and “new” movements as they bring together actors associated with both types, such as trade unions, development charities and environmental groups. They can thus be more accurately characterised as “networked” movements, assembling heterogeneous participants in broad coalitions that cut across traditional divides. What unites recent movements is a diffuse collective purpose rather than a rigid ideology. Their organising processes are decentralised and emphasise the values of participatory democracy. Digital communication technologies facilitate these characteristics as they enhance the movements’ ability to organise quickly, to attract a broad membership and to widely disseminate compelling messages. However, ‘networked’ movements have a fragile sense of unity and can easily be disassembled to their individual components. Their capacity for social change rests less on their aptitude for effecting policy change and more on their symbolic power and on their ability to offer a transformative experience and build solidarity among diverse actors.

Anastasia Kavada is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Journalism & Mass Communication of the University of Westminster. Her research concerns the use of new communication technologies, such as email lists and social media, by protest movements and advocacy groups. Anastasia’s research interests focus on the links between online tools and decentralised organizing practices, democratic decision-making, and the development of solidarity and a sense of common identity among participants in collective action. Her case studies have included the Global Justice Movement and the European Social Forum process, as well as Avaaz, Amnesty International and 38 degrees. Her work has appeared in a variety of edited books and academic journals, including Media, Culture & Society, the International Journal of E-Politics and Information, Communication & Society.

@AnastasiaKavada

Old, new and networked movements: characteristics and capacities for social change

Day 2

Jérémie Bédard-Wien Coalition Large de l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (CLASSE)

A seventy-five percent increase in university tuition fees led to a historic student strike of a scope Quebec had never seen, with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets against the neoliberal project hiding behind reforms to education. International media has dubbed this movement the “maple spring”, framing it as a representation of a global outcry against austerity. The intersection of social movements is indeed historic, as we rally around a common narrative and use similar methods of communication, countering editorial lines by an appropriation of small media. However, the Quebec student movement relies on mechanisms unseen in other social movements. Our structures are closest to the 1970s trade union movements of Quebec and Britain and eloquently demonstrate it is possible for the Left to reconcile non-hierarchical, non-oppressive, democratic principles with staunch unionism. Indeed, our strike must be seen as a platform for other initiatives, such as artistic endeavours reminiscent of May ‘68 and its offsprings. The presentation will also explore the relationship between media and movement. The respective

rhythms of democratic decision-making bodies, civil society, traditional media and alternative media are telling about the very nature of our social movement and its relationship with society.

Jérémie Bédard-Wien is the finance secretary of the Coalition Large de l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (CLASSE). Founded in late 2011 as a temporary coalition, CLASSE has spearheaded the broadest student strike in the history of the Canadian province of Quebec. Through the flourishing of small media, it captured international attention and defined itself as the North American response to othersocial movements against austerity.

@belgiumonepoint

Making the case for democratic mass movements: the 2012 Quebec student strike

Day 2

Chair: Sameer Padania Open Society Foundations-London

Sameer Padania is a Program Officer in Open Society Foundations’ Media Program, with a brief that includes overseeing mediapolicy.org. Sameer has spent much of the last ten years looking at how the internet and other new ICTs impact on journalism, media policy and human rights. He worked at Panos London for six years on a range of journalism and media development projects, for three years at the New York-based human rights organisation WITNESS on human rights video and technology policy and as Global Voices’ Editor for human rights video. Before joining OSF in mid-2012, he worked as a consultant for a range of clients including the Knight Foundation and the Bertha Foundation to Yahoo’s Business and Human Rights Program and Global Partners & Associates. In the rather distant past he worked in film journalism, distribution and production, and as a TV documentary researcher. Sameer is on the board of New York-based archaeological foundation Archaeos and is a Fellow of the RSA. (Work: mediapolicy.org / blog: blog.sameerpadania.com)

@sdp

Session Four Media

How are small media echoed and elaborated by big media, and how can their inter-relationships be fostered?

Day 2

Pooneh Ghoddoosi BBC

BBC Persian and BBC World Service have been applauded for making best usage of social media and making great efforts in utilising them to improve our coverage. I will be talking about the challenges and opportunities that small media and social media present for big media such as the BBC. I’ll discuss the efforts we make in monitoring, verifying, evaluating and co-operating with this phenomenon, one that some mainstream journalists consider our biggest threat and others think of as our biggest ally. I will talk about how big news organisations and experienced journalists can make social and small media their friend rather than their enemy or competitor. I will also talk about the concerns, doubts and the difficulties of this alliance.

Pooneh Ghoddoosi joined the BBC in 2000 and is one of the BBC’s select group of multilingual presenters. In her 12 years at the BBC, Pooneh has worked as a radio and television presenter and producer on news, current affairs and interactive programmes for BBC World News and BBC Persian. She presented BBC Persian’s award-winning Interactive programme, Nobat-e Shoma (Your Turn) and has appeared as a guest presenter on BBC World Service Radio’s World Have Your Say. In 2009-2010, Pooneh managed a project on the effective use of social media and user-generated content in BBC Global News. The project led to new editorial guidelines for social media, which are currently being used across BBC Global News. Pooneh first started working as a journalist in 1990 for the New York Times and has since worked for a number of international media outlets including the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times and PBS.

@poopoosh

Why beat them? join them

Day 2

Claire Ulrich Global Voices

Based on her experience as a professional journalist advocating for citizen media in France and as editor of citizen media Global Voices in French since 2007, Claire Ulrich reflects on a five-year transformative relationship between traditional media and citizen media on the web (2007-2012). Traditional media completely transformed themselves, their routines, sourcing and perspectives while integrating many innovations and tools invented by volunteer citizen journalists and by grassroots initiatives on the web. But have small and citizen media really been rewarded in return from this innovation transfer, or have they been stripped of their audience, motivation and influence by this collaboration?

Claire Ulrich is a journalist with more than 20 years of professional experience in traditional media in France (print, radio, TV), who has advocated for bloggers and citizen journalism since 2004. Claire is a linguist and currently editor of the Global Voices in French site, the Francophone arm of the citizen media site Global Voices Online, and a member of its board of directors. She is involved with various organisations in France and West Africa promoting digital literacy, social cyberactivism, freedom of expression and the transformative power of citizen journalism, blogs and social media, with a focus on francophone Africa.

@ClaireInParis

Traditional media vs citizen media: collaboration or rip-off?

Day 2

Chair: Sameer Padania Open Society Foundations-London

Sameer Padania is a Program Officer in Open Society Foundations’ Media Program, with a brief that includes overseeing mediapolicy.org. Sameer has spent much of the last ten years looking at how the internet and other new ICTs impact on journalism, media policy and human rights. He worked at Panos London for six years on a range of journalism and media development projects, for three years at the New York-based human rights organisation WITNESS on human rights video and technology policy and as Global Voices’ Editor for human rights video. Before joining OSF in mid-2012, he worked as a consultant for a range of clients including the Knight Foundation and the Bertha Foundation to Yahoo’s Business and Human Rights Program and Global Partners & Associates. In the rather distant past he worked in film journalism, distribution and production, and as a TV documentary researcher. Sameer is on the board of New York-based archaeological foundation Archaeos and is a Fellow of the RSA. (Work: mediapolicy.org / blog: blog.sameerpadania.com)

@sdp

Session Five Case Studies

Day 2

Jennifer JonesUniversity of the West of Scotland

#citizenrelay (citizenrelay.net) was a participatory media project led by researchers at the University of the West of Scotland (UWS) to engage individuals and groups across the length and breadth of Scotland in the creation of multimedia content, aggregated on a blog platform to share alternative stories about the Olympic Torch Relay. The project’s unique vision was to provide a media space for the oral and visual recording of Scotland’s citizens’ views on the London 2012 Olympic Torch Relay, complementing the work of mainstream media organisations but narrating a story from the perspective of local content producers. The case study presented reflects on the process of developing the technological infrastructure and human capital necessary to operationalise the vision for #citizenrelay to produce significant participation and content creation. The citizenrelay website secured in excess of 20,000 visits during the Torch Relay’s week-long stay in Scotland and the team produced 207 audioboo three-minute podcasts, nearly 110 YouTube videos, 805 Flickr photos, 350 Instagram images and the effective sharing of content using the #citizenrelay hashtag.

The paper will focus on the importance of immediacy (of content generation and upload), connectedness (physically and virtually), locality (as the origin of stories), empowerment (to become media makers) and participation (the ethos of accessibility) as features of successful citizen journalism initiatives.

Jennifer Jones is a Research Associate and is completing her PhD within the School of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of the West of Scotland. She is working on projects closely tied to the Vancouver 2010 and London 2012 Olympic Games, in the context of emerging media landscapes and alternative media communities. She specialises in new media methods for data capture, collection and archiving, in particular around social media and mega-events, whilst focusing on the continuous link between digital practice and theory. Jennifer was the coordinator for #citizenrelay, a citizen journalism project that chased the Olympic torch relay whilst in Scotland, reporting on the untold stories of London 2012.

@jennifermjones

#citizenrelay: participatory research and citizen journalism to capture the untold stories of mega events

Day 2

Voices for change: the new migrant media

Nazek RamadanMigrant Voice

Migrants’ voices are often missing from the media, while migration is widely and variably reported on. Migrants need to find platforms to engage in the conversation about them and take control of their messages. Migrant Voice facilitates migrants’ engagement and provides a platform for authentic voices through the production of own media work as well as engaging with the mainstream media. This presentation looks at Migrant Voice’s approach to media work and the background for this work. It will provide examples of the type of work the organisation does, its processes and outcome.

Nazak Ramadan is the director of Migrant Voice and the founder and editor in chief of the Migrant Voice newspaper. She is also the founder of the New Londoners, the first refugee newspaper in London. Nazek is vice chair for the European Anti Poverty Network–England (EAPN–England) and represents the EAPN (UK) on the Anti-discrimination and Migration working group at EAPN Europe. Nazek has over 25 years of experience working with migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and ethnic minorities in the UK, focusing on promoting their voice, representation and participation in the media and policymaking as well as on integration issues. Her work has included the production of a number of reports and short films. She was awarded The London Migrant and Refugee Woman of the Year award 2012.

Day 2

Matt McAlisterGuardian Media Group

This talk looks at how local communities are changing as a result of evolving technologies and digital platforms, social norms in digital space and the citizen reporter.

Matt McAlister is director of digital strategy at Guardian Media Group. He began his online media career in Silicon Valley marketing internet software in 1994. He then spent nine years at IDG, leading the online businesses at The Industry Standard, Macworld and InfoWorld magazines. He joined Yahoo! in 2005 in the platforms division where he led several open strategy initiatives such as RSS, social media and the developer network. In 2008 he joined the Guardian in London to establish the Open Platform. Matt is now building new businesses at the Guardian including the recently launched n0tice.com - a mobile noticeboard platform for local communities.

@mattmcalister

Rewiring the news

Day 2

Think globally, act locally: an old paradigm for a new media environment

Rohan JayasekeraIndex on Censorship

Everywhere, no more or less than in Tunisia, we are engaged in what is described as “a battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment”. The battle is waged in global fora such as the IGF and WCIT, but policymaking in local regulatory practice at national level will have just as significant an impact on the free expression rights of national online media, big and small. In Tunisia officials and activists alike are working towards an internet that – from Tunisia at least – gives open access to a new and evolving public sphere where opinions can be formulated, shared and turned into consensus for mobilisation. The challenge facing the new generation of bloggers, media practitioners and free expression activists is to force a change to the way politicians and citizens exchange and debate ideas in Tunisia, and to use the media as a means to cut across old hierarchies and to connect with individuals and networks of individuals.

Rohan Jayasekera is currently an Associate Editor at Index on Censorship in London, specialising in devising, funding and directing creative investigative publishing and advocacy programmes in different cultures and societies in conflict. A journalist who has covered datelines including Bosnia, Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq, he chaired the IFEX Tunisia Monitoring Group of international free expression NGOs in the run up to the Arab Spring. He is the former managing editor of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, a former Fleet Street journalist and an award-winning editor. He wrote his first page of HTML in 1995 and line of PHP in 2000 and can still de-bug a bit of code if pressed, but has to be.

@rohanjay

Day 2

Somnath Batabyal SOAS

Somnath Batabyal is Lecturer in Media and Development at SOAS. He works on news production practices and newsroom politics focusing on India, development theory and climate change issues. Don’t Cut My Head Off is his first documentary.

Closing Address

Day 2

Day 2

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The Small Media Initiative explores the role of small media in processes of social, political and economic change. Founded at the end of 2010, it operates since late 2011 under the umbrella of the Centre for Media and Film Studies (CMFS), School of Arts at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and brings together CMFS research staff and doctoral students.