Media, Democracy and Representation: Disembodying the Public

Abstract

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Situating the geographies of injustice in democratic theory

“…On this understanding, normatively acceptable, legitimate decisions are those which meet with the agreement of all affected parties who have the opportunity of subjecting them to critical debate and discussion (Habermas, 1996, p. 107). The immediate implication of this 'desubstantialization' of the concept of popular sovereignty into 'subjectless flows of communication' (see Barnett, 2004b) seems to be the extension of the spatial scope over which norms of democratic universalism should be applied. However, as this implication is worked out in various post-Habermasian accounts of transnational democracy, we can identify a morphing of the spatial imaginaries through which issues of democratic agency are imagined.…”

“The Old Man is Dead”: Hip Hop and the Arts of Citizenship of Senegalese Youth

“…There is a growing scholarship examining the way that spaces of youth are being reconfigured in a globalizing Africa (Diouf ; Katz ), with increasing attention paid to the role of popular media (Barnett ; Dolby ; Wasserman ) and, particularly, youth music geographies in resculpting citizenship and the public sphere (Barnett ; Hansen ). Without presuming that music and its situated practices are necessarily liberatory, youth music geographies can, nonetheless, provide vital arenas for the negotiation of political identities through offering possibilities for rebellion or contestation, a claim to voice, group membership, or a place in the city (Kong ; Hudson ).…”

Circulating cities of difference: assembling geographical imaginations of Toronto’s diversity in the newsroom

“…However, in situating this circulatory space via an analysis of the site of city editing at the Toronto Star, what I have sought to present here is an actual -and not merely metaphorical -public space that is not so easily segmented off from interactions in more spatially-bounded or localized public milieus (cf. Barnett 2004Barnett 2007Iveson 2007;Warner 2002 Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 195-200). As Latour (1993: 125-126) puts it:…”