Democracy and Media in Europe : A Discursive-material Approach

Democracy and Media in Europe: A Discursive-Material Approach is a theoretical reflection on the intersection of democracy and media through a constructionist lens.

This focus allows us to understand current political struggles over democracy, and over media’s democratic roles, with the latter ranging from the traditional support for an informed citizenry and the watchdog role, to the organization of agonistic debate and generating fair and dignified representations of society and its many (sub)groups, to the facilitation of maximalist participation in institutionalized politics and media. Moreover, the book’s reconciliation of democratic theory and media theory brings out a detailed theoretical analysis of the core characteristics of the assemblages of democracy and media, their conditions of possibility and the threats to both democracy and media’s democratic roles.

This short book provides in-depth reflections on the different positions that can be taken when it comes to the performance of democracy as it intersects with the multitude of media in the 21st century. As such, the volume will be of interest to scholars of media and communication and related fields in the social sciences.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Nico Carpentier is Extraordinary Professor at Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic) and Visiting Professor at Tallinn University (Estonia) and at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (Suzhou, China). He was Vice-President of the European Communication Research and Education Association (2008–2012) and President of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (2020-2024). His theoretical focus is on discourse theory, his research is situated in the relationship between communication, politics and culture, especially in social domains as war and conflict, ideology, participation and democracy. His latest monographs are The Discursive-Material Knot (2017) and Iconoclastic Controversies (2021). His last exhibition was The Mirror of Conflict photography exhibition, in October 2023 at the Energy Museum, Istanbul in Türkiye, and in October 2024 at the Hollar Gallery, Prague, in the Czech Republic.

Jeffrey Wimmer is Professor of Communication Science with an emphasis on media reality at the University of Augsburg, Germany. From 2008 to 2014, he was chairing the ‘Communication and Democracy’ section of the European Communication Research and Education Association, and from 2009 to 2015, the ‘Sociology of Media Communication’ section of the German Association of Communication Science. His research and teaching focuses on the sociology of media communication, public sphere and participation, mediatization and media change, digital games and virtual worlds. Recent edited book publications include (Mis-)Understanding Political Participation (2018, Routledge) and The Forgotten Subject (2023).