Dr John Postill

Bräuchler, B. and J. Postill (eds) (forthcoming 2008) Theorising Media and Practice. Oxford and New York: Berghahn.

In recent decades, key theorists from across the social sciences and humanities have moved away from constraining notions of the social (such as structure or system) towards more agency-oriented accounts based on the notion of social practice. At the same time, old and new media forms and social technologies have rapidly proliferated around the world. What are the implications of the turn to practice for our understanding of media in a swiftly changing world? Theorising Media and Practice brings together leading international media scholars from the fields of anthropology, sociology and semiotics in a collaborative effort to elucidate this long overdue question.

Drawing on the work of practice theorists such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, Bourdieu, Barth and Shatzki as well as on a wide range of ethnographic case studies and media forms, contributors to this volume address a number of important themes: definitions of media practice; media, practice and culture; media power and the 'anchoring' of social practice; integrative media spaces; media in practice and process; the discursive articulations of media practices. The authors explore media practices as complex sets of social acts unevenly embedded in cultural worlds which they have the potential to reconstitute, transform or dissolve.

Theorising Media and Practice will be of particular interest to scholars, students and practitioners of media and communications studies, sociology, anthropology, semiotics and social theory.

Chapter contributors: Nick Couldry, Mark Hobart, Jo Helle-Valle, Debra Spitulnik, Elizabeth Bird, Ursula Rao, Steven Hughes, Don Slater, Guido Ipsen, Cathy Greenhalgh, Alexander Knorr, Elisenda Ardevol et al, Thomas Taaffe, Mark A. Peterson and Jens Kjaerulff, with an afterword by David Morley.

BOOK OUTLINE

Prologue
Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill

Introduction: Media theory and the turn to practice
John Postill

SECTION I PRACTISING MEDIA THEORY

Chapter 1
Theorising media as practice
Nick Couldry

Chapter 2
What do we mean by 'media practices'?
Mark Hobart

Chapter 3
In/dividuals and contextualised media: A Wittgensteinian approach to media practice
Jo Helle-Valle

SECTION II MEDIA, PRACTICE AND CULTURE

Chapter 4
Media culture(s) and the concept of practice: Fields without fences?
Debra Spitulnik

Chapter 5
Media-related practices and the constitution of contemporary culture
Elizabeth S. Bird

Chapter 6
Embedded/embedding media practices and cultural re/production
Ursula Rao

SECTION III SPACES OF MEDIA PRACTICE

Chapter 7
Film exhibition as mediating practice
Steve Hughes

Chapter 8
Ethnography and communicative ecology: Local networks and the assembling of media technologies
Don Slater

SECTION IV MEDIA IN PRACTICE AND PROCESS

Chapter 9
Communication, cognition, usage: The holistic sphere of practices and processes in the media
Guido Ipsen

Chapter 10
Film-making? Cinematography as practice, process, and procedure
Cathy Greenhalgh

Chapter 11
Game modding as collective practice and process
Alexander Knorr

Chapter 12
Theorising new media practice: The transformation of audiovisual contents shared over the Internet
Elisenda Ardevol, Antoni Roig, Gemma San Cornelio, Pau Alsina, Ruth Pagès

SECTION V ARTICULATING MEDIA PRACTICE

Chapter 13
Articulating practice and the production of news
Thomas Taaffe

Chapter 14
'But it is my habit to take The Times': Metaculture and practice in the reading of Indian newspapers
Mark A. Peterson

Chapter 15
A Barthian approach to media and representation in practices of telework
Jens Kjaerulff

AFTERWORD

David Morley

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