If you’re interested, here is a link to a paper called Media practices and urban politics: conceptualizing the powers of the urban-media nexus, by Scott Rodgers, Allan Cochrane and myself, which is forthcoming soonish in Society and Space. This is the last of a series of things we have written and convened together since 2007, emerging from Scott’s time at the OU on an ESRC Postdoc fellowship and stretching beyond that (remember those?). This includes a symposium on the theme of ‘Where is urban politics?’ and an earlier Debate section of the same journal, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, on ‘Media, Politics and Cities‘.
Here is the abstract for the latest piece:
“The spatial imaginations of media studies and urban studies are increasingly aligned, illustrated by a growing literature on what can be identified as the media-urban nexus. This nexus has attracted scholarly interest not only as a cultural phenomenon, but also as a site of emergent political dynamics. We suggest that literature on the media-urban nexus points to the always-already present conditions of possibility for a trans-local, relational urban politics. Current conceptualizations of the politics of urbanized media however tend to fall into one of two registers: conflicts over the access to and regulation of urban media spaces; or the silent politics media inscribe into the affective textures of urban life. Both tend to envision media as instrumental supplements to politics, over-estimating the powers of ‘media’ within urban living. Drawing on recent uses of practice theory in media studies, we highlight how thinking of media- in-practices provides a basis for more nuanced conceptualizations of the powers of the media- urban nexus. Fully realizing this conceptualization requires that the restriction of the insights of practice theory to everyday life be lifted. An expanded view of media practices is required, one which emphasizes the coordination between organized fields of communication and everyday urbanized media practices.”