Place, Power, Media : Mediated Responses to Globalization

Place, Power, Media: Mediated Responses to Globalization is a compelling, interdisciplinary exploration of how media practices and communication rituals are connected to larger economic, social, and political processes in a globalizing world. Through a rich variety of media texts, authors examine how daily, mundane, and interpersonal processes help shape ‘our’ place in the world, a placement that is integrally connected to social relations at the global level. Denoting a sense of geography as well as demarcating diverse social positionings, place is understood as the result of historical and contemporary discourses occurring on a range of scales and within different cultural, aesthetic, and political contexts. The authors argue that the construction, restoration, configuration, and representation of place is an important project at multiple levels; what meanings are derived from it, what meanings are infused, who the key players are, what power struggles are inherent―these issues offer rich areas of study for global media scholars interested in the place-making powers of media.

Divya McMillin is Professor of Global Media Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and Executive Director of the Institute for Global Engagement and the Global Honors Program at the University of Washington Tacoma. She is author of International Media Studies (2007) and Mediated Identities: Youth, Agency, and Globalization (Peter Lang, 2009). McMillin’s research on media globalization and audiences has been published in such journals as the Journal of Communication, Popular Communication Journal, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, and Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, to name a few. She has published extensively on global television and hybridity in such anthologies as 20 Questions on Youth and Media (Peter Lang, 2018), The Mediated Youth Reader (Peter Lang, 2016), Critical Asian Histories (2015), TV’s Betty Goes Global (2013), and Re-Orienting Global Communication (2010).

Joost de Bruin is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa/New Zealand. He teaches in the areas of audience studies, television studies, popular culture and media and cultural identity. He has published articles in journals such as Television and New Media, Continuum, Media International Australia and Participations. With Koos Zwaan, he co-edited a volume on the Idols television format: Adapting Idols: Authenticity, identity and performance in a global television format (2012). He has published chapters in anthologies on global television formats and indigenous media.

Jo Smith (Waitaha, Kati Mamoe, Kai Tahu) is Associate Professor, Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Smith has a longstanding interest in understanding how media shapes worldviews, relationships and identities and she investigates how the media’s storytelling powers can generate new forms of understanding and ways of being in the world. She has a Film Studies PhD from her hometown university (Otago) and she currently works in the Media Studies programme at Victoria University of Wellington where she teaches on Maori media, and issues to do with race, ethnicity and identity. The author of Maori Television: the first ten years (2016), Jo has recently contributed to kaupapa Maori projects to do with decolonisation and the media, Maori agribusinesses and soil health. Current work includes contributing to a Maori Land and Water Food Story (Storying Kaitiakitanga) and Maori housing issues (Kainga Tahi, Kainga Rua and the AKO Ahu).