Research team
Expertise
My research expertise lies at the intersection of media and communication studies, film and television studies, media production studies, and cultural studies. I investigate how media are produced, circulated, and experienced, with particular attention to the social, spatial, political, and labour conditions of media production. A central strand of my current research concerns media production within and around prison communities. I study media created by incarcerated people, their families, activists, civil-society organisations, and cultural practitioners, including letters, newspapers, radio and podcasts, social media, film, video, and visual art. This work addresses questions of incarceration, surveillance, abolitionism, representation, access to communication technologies, and the capacity of media to create connections between prisons and wider publics. My broader research examines film and television production, media industries, screen labour, and the relationship between media production and place. I have studied location shooting and screen production in European cities, including the effects of production on urban spaces, local communities, and cultural workers. Related research addresses sustainability and extractivism in screen industries, including environmental impact, precarious labour, representation, and practices of slow production and spectatorship. Further areas of expertise include urban communication and media geography; migration, displacement and representation; participatory and community media; visual culture; digital and social media; media audiences and spectatorship; and questions of race, ethnicity, gender, inequality and social justice in media production and representation.
Media production of prison communities (WALLS2BRIDGES).
Abstract
Incarceration is widely depicted in films, TV, and the news, but prison communities—imprisoned people, their families, and anti-prison activists—are seldom recognized as media producers. Developing a transnational, collaborative, and comparative model of media justice, this project examines textual, visual, and sound media created by prison communities. It focuses on France, Turkey, the UK, and the US, where racial and ethnic discrimination stimulated mass incarceration of minorities from the mid-1960s, which marks the start of global mass incarceration and widescale prison revolts. The transhistorical and multimedia project attends to diverse prison environments and communities and their differential access to media. This study is grounded in three topics fundamental to media, its place in society, and its function in human relations today: media and surveillance, media and the senses, and media and justice. The research questions it addresses are: a) What are the subversive uses of media by people who commonly experience them as tools of surveillance? b) How does the experience of imprisonment impact different sensory strategies and engagements with media? c) How can media provide a space of safety and justice for underprivileged communities? WALLS2BRIDGES is groundbreaking in three ways. Theoretically, by bringing together media, literature and art studies, criminology, and racial and ethnic studies, it is innovative in approaching prison communities as media producers who resist stigmatization and marginalization. Methodologically, by integrating multimethod research (archival research, epistolary ethnography, fieldwork, media design, netnography, textual and audiovisual analysis), it maps historical and multimedia strategiesfor marginalized self-expression. Substantially, by opening a debate on media justice for communitiesin oppressive environments it engages in broader debates on social inclusion and equality.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Çelik Rappas Ipek Azime
Research team(s)
Funding
- EU-KADER
Project type(s)
- Research Project
Media production of prison communities (WALLS2BRIDGES). (ZAPBOF-mandaat)
Abstract
Incarceration is widely depicted in films, TV, and the news, but prison communities—imprisoned people, their families, and anti-prison activists—are seldom recognized as media producers. Developing a transnational, collaborative, and comparative model of media justice, this project examines textual, visual, and sound media created by prison communities. It focuses on France, Turkey, the UK, and the US, where racial and ethnic discrimination stimulated mass incarceration of minorities from the mid-1960s, which marks the start of global mass incarceration and widescale prison revolts. The transhistorical and multimedia project attends to diverse prison environments and communities and their differential access to media. This study is grounded in three topics fundamental to media, its place in society, and its function in human relations today: media and surveillance, media and the senses, and media and justice. The research questions it addresses are: a) What are the subversive uses of media by people who commonly experience them as tools of surveillance? b) How does the experience of imprisonment impact different sensory strategies and engagements with media? c) How can media provide a space of safety and justice for underprivileged communities? WALLS2BRIDGES is groundbreaking in three ways. Theoretically, by bringing together media, literature and art studies, criminology, and racial and ethnic studies, it is innovative in approaching prison communities as media producers who resist stigmatization and marginalization. Methodologically, by integrating multimethod research (archival research, epistolary ethnography, fieldwork, media design, netnography, textual and audiovisual analysis), it maps historical and multimedia strategiesfor marginalized self-expression. Substantially, by opening a debate on media justice for communitiesin oppressive environments it engages in broader debates on social inclusion and equality.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Çelik Rappas Ipek Azime
- Fellow: Çelik Rappas Ipek Azime
Research team(s)
Funding
- BOF
- BOF
Project type(s)
- Research Project