Museums are turning to digital platforms in engaging with decolonial work. The Reciprocal Research Network, co-designed with First Nation communities in Canada, is intended as a platform to involve indigenous communities in heritage work. Using actor-network theory, nine interviews with users, developers and steering group members helped to identify specific enactments of decolonial aspirations with the platform pages and data as actants in the process. Affordances relating to breaking technological and cultural barriers and plurality of interactions can be observed from multiple entryways and engagement possibilities with indigenous heritage objects from 29 different museums. While communities used heritage to revive culture, the museums often failed at relationship building and isolated and marginalized First Nation activities.
The emergence of the entrepreneurship model gave rise to new spaces for exchange and debate around strategic choices and directions for development. This article focuses on the case of the regional committees of the National Initiative for Human Development (INDH) which operates to implement the program following a participatory approach bringing together elected officials, officers and representatives of civil society. The objective is to study the capacity of associative activists to participate in the INDH program following a systemic approach based on the theory of capacities and the socioconstructivist theory of communicational action. In order to do this, a qualitative methodology, mobilizing the case study and the semi-directional interview was put in place with the following results: the inability to achieve inter-understanding between the different actors due to socio-cultural and structural elements constituting the participatory practice, and the restriction of this participatory practice to a simple means of legitimizing local public policies.
This article explores the results of a study on media participation on Twitter in 2018/2019 perceived as contributing to far right and Islamist radical ideologies, in 7 European countries. By combining online ethnography and big data approaches, we see that online far right extremism in Europe is active and ranks are growing, while Islamist extremism has been incapacitated in sharing controversial forms of expression. We describe how the far right uses Twitter as a means for political activism, while Islamist extremists offer lifestyle information, related to local branches of faith, using Twitter as a storefront that re-routes users to other platforms. We consider resources for action, notably on the far right. World leaders influence followers online and support a global conversation between users that paves the way to a far right European milieu thriving on Twitter. To conclude, we delve into the notions of radicalisation and political participation to emphasise the asymmetry between the two forms of media participation in respect to academic discourses and big tech and States’ practises.
This text sheds light on the elaboration and circulation of representations driven by entrepreneurs and major banking players about blockchains. It is based on ethnographic observations of community events organised around blockchains. It was conducted from 2020 to 2021, lasting from 2 hours to 7 days. This has been completed by online contents. The article focuses on the major representations produced and disseminated within financial spaces. It looks at the emergence of a founding myth of the Bitcoin blockchain and its reappropriation as a myth announcing a renewal of finance. By studying its circulations, it shows that certain blockchains are considered as a technical solution to 2008 crisis. These projections then give them a central place, making them a tool that would allow better anticipation of risks. Projects based on these ideas were then developed. They are promoted within collective spaces conducive to the mobilisation of public and private investment, and via new media such as Twitter, podcasts and online media.
In the context of the referendum in New Caledonia under the Nouméa Accords, the representatives and leaders of the pro-independence parties are dealing with both field activism and that of the television platforms and social networks. However, in the context of New Caledonia's digital transition, the differences in technological equipment and socio-economic inequalities lead to power relationships between independentists and non-independents according to the appropriation of digital technology by the militants. The analysis of the digital communication on Facebook of the political parties, the week before the 2020 referendum, shows an increase in digital interactions among independentists since 2018 on the one hand, and a discourse with cultural and religious attributes on the other hand, where the "self" is erased in favour of the community belonging. This study thus examines the potential of Facebook to correlate on-line expression with militant expression on the terrain, reinforcing the visibility of the pro-independence community collective with the constraints of accessibility to digital equipment and visibility of this group in the traditional media space.
This research is part of communication studies on the interplay between religion and media. It is also part of research on the use of Twitter by religious people and the use of social media in the Arab world, and more specifically the current article focuses on the priorities of Arab religious preachers in the Arab-Muslim world in their uses of Twitter. I have chosen a Muslim preacher who has been the owner of the most followed Twitter account in the Arab-Muslim world: Mohamad al-Arefe. At the time of my research, this Saudi Sunni preacher was ranked in the 83rd[1] place in the global ranking of the most followed Twitter accounts in the world. This article aims to develop a typology of content shared on Twitter by al-Arefe. This research examines the way the Twitter platform is being used by this preacher, and it answers the question whether the theoretical model of religion mediatisation applies to the content shared by al-Arefe. This article combines two methodological approaches to study the content shared by al-Arefe on his Twitter account: a quantitative method and a qualitative one. I focus on the analysis of three elements present among the contents shared by this preacher on his Twitter account: Hashtags, visuals and links. Finally, my analysis shows how al-Arefe focuses more on his person and his image than he focuses on presenting Islamic teachings.
This contribution deals with the evolution of women's mobilization forms and digital activism in Tunisia and Morocco and their media coverage. The objective is to observe and describe the main demand topics for more individual freedoms and women's rights carried by citizen and activist actors in the Tunisian and Moroccan digital space. The study focuses on a double corpus resulting from a regular monitoring of Facebook pages, Twitter accounts as well as the Youtube platform. This analysis allowed us to point out the new forms of engagement allowed by digital media and to show the emergence, in these countries, of a new activism from below that is complementary but autonomous from classical activism.
Introduction. Cultural Heritage as the Genetic Code of Societies and the Role of Digital Technologies in its Preservation
This paper aims to analyze the political stakes of media coverage in the relationship between the Chinese state and anti-Islam activism. A corpus of more than 210,000 media and user data (posts, reposts, comments, etc.) has been built from Weibo based on two events: the Kunming train station attack in China in 2014 and the Paris attacks in 2015. This work identifies, through an analysis of media content and users, the main composition of anti-Islam activism, the state's strategy of ambiguity to this activism and a less censored space of debate constructed communicatively in the process of mediatization of Islamophobia.
Radio broadcasting is the means of communication, which focuses the most on the language, and the one, which best brings it to life. It is for this reason that the proliferation of radio stations, especially in the most remote areas of the world, constitutes an opportunity for the survival of local languages. African radio stations live this experience on a daily basis. They use local languages extensively, giving them a life beyond their use in the tight circles in which they may be confined due to the imposition of Western languages the instruction, work and sometimes even the media field. However, this is not the same on the Internet, where we can certainly rejoice in listening to programs in African languages, but with much less possibilities than on the terrestrial band. The question is to know what explains this discrepancy between the abundant offer of radio stations in terms of languages in their FM programming and the relative absence of these same languages in their online programming.
Through an interdisciplinary approach linking ritual studies, microsociology, anthropology and the binding communication paradigm in particular, this article broaches upon Catholic marriage as a subject of studies. This is a first attempt at considering the strength of the link established in the Catholic marriage, by focusing more notably on interaction and communication contexts. It is suggested that in the future, connections could be drawn between rites and commitment, according to the meaning of the very same theory.
Archive/Counter-Archive (A/CA): Activating Canada's Moving Image Heritage is a seven-year research-creation project involving more than 100 collaborating artists, academics, and activists from across the country that reveals how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) come into contact with vulnerable community-driven audiovisual archives, an important part of contemporary cultural heritage. This article examines the power dynamics embedded in A/CA as well as in current ICT infrastructure, legislation, and organizational policy and resources, to address two emergent challenges experienced by the network over a three-year period. The authors ask whether and in what ways A/CA was able to oppose the extractive power dynamics embedded within the current cultural heritage preservation and ICT management systems through operational models and ICT tools that incorporate creative approaches. Locating this project where community-engaged research comes together with the study of digitization and platformization of cultural production and heritage, the authors used autoethnographic and feminist intersectional discourse analyses to examine the tensions and challenges embedded in the communities of practice that took shape over these three years. The first set of findings explores the organizational limits imposed on the network’s participants, including the lack of national and local resources for digitizing and sharing vulnerable and often marginalized media archives. This was addressed in the A/CA context by developing a flexible contracting approach for the digitization and use of the vulnerable media being digitized, as well as through the development of a national Action Plan. The second set of findings demonstrates how creative interventions in community-based partnerships and artist residencies affected the genesis of a Principles of Respect (PoR) Committee and related pragmatic in-the-field efforts to address some of the historically troubled relationships that large, official media archives have had with Indigenous and Black communities. The authors explore the ways in which creative workshops and artist residencies are mobilized within A/CA to help build a more respectful and reciprocal set of relations. Lastly, we examine the broader implications for intellectual property and content management as it is influenced by the current role of ICTs in relation to cultural heritage, suggesting some ways forward.
The present research studies the process of digital transformation in the heritage institutions. With the COVID-19 pandemic and constant development of modern digital technologies museums are forced to build their unique representation in the digital environment and keep the legacy and established functions simultaneously. At the same time, museums assume that this transformation will not only ruin the classical understanding of the museums but also make the institutions a form of mass-entertainment. The usage of both qualitative and quantitative methods aims to create a theoretical framework that will determine the possible tools and areas of the museums’ digitization. The evolution of cultural institutions can be seen as a primary indicator of global development.
This article proposes to analyze the protest discourse of MNHTM. In order to understand its functioning, it is confronted with the various contexts which promote it and which determine its functional and representative complexity. This will lead to deduce how the activists of this movement rely on a rhetorical arsenal and factors that are more situational than structural to advance their position. The collection of our corpus is made possible by ethnographic and nethnographic observation of MNHTM protest practices. It is completed by interviews with its representatives and members. This paper draws on the methodological and conceptual apparatus of the sociology of social movements and discourse analysis to show that the protesting statements of this movement aim to convince by means of a tight argument, enriched by their modulation according to the differences in perception of the nursing cause. In this respect, the discourse becomes a tool that is used to integrate institutional channels. The construction of the mobilizing opportunity is motivated by the same objective. However, based on perceived contextual cues, it does not work as expected.
In this article, we examine how the audiovisual productions of the Partage de Cultures project complement and enrich the intangible cultural heritage of a country by renewing the process of construction and transmission of heritage knowledge. Based on the analysis of a corpus composed of 20 semi-structured interviews and observation notes, we show that the testimony of refugees on YouTube brings out a form of peer-to-peer mediation, audiovisual and digital, capable of enriching the intangible cultural heritage. We thus make visible a new form of engagement in heritage activity, centered on the participation of ordinary people. In doing so, the device created also contributes to the integration of refugees in society.
This article examines the socio-cultural event of the Fête des Vignerons, which takes place in French-speaking Switzerland every 20 to 25 years, and its archiving on social media. Based on an online and on-site ethnography, we analyze how social media contribute to the preservation of cultural heritage and from which elements the collective memory of this event is built. Grounding on the data published on the regional platform notreHistoire.ch, we identified three categories of memory traces in social media and described the particularities of memory observed through user content and practices.
The damage to dwellings caused by the shrinkage-swelling of clay concerns millions of thousands of houses. Why isn't it more controversial in the public media? Within the framework of a dual approach, those of the agenda-building and the social construction of risks, the objective is to understand the reasons which encourage the various stakeholders to request or not to request media coverage of the clay risk. On the methodological level, semi-structured interviews were conducted with various actors in Puy-de-Dôme. Our study reveals that journalistic, political, technical or even administrative reasons explain this phenomenon and, moreover, that the clay risk is presented as a depoliticized risk with little media coverage, limiting the awareness of the phenomenon by the general public and the taking of decisions in order to reduce the impact of this natural hazard.
We use the concept of cultural movements as a theoretical basis to reflect on the sociotechnical infrastructure of three Wikimedia initiatives in Brazil: the photography contest Wiki Loves Monuments, the National Museum Cross-Wiki Project and the Museu Paulista GLAM-Wiki partnership. We analyse how they were organised and how their workflow is coordinated in a collaborative environment. We also present their strategies for the preservation of cultural heritage collections and for the innovation in content dissemination. The evidence points to the relevance of Wikidata—a collaborative, open database—for structuring information and optimising coordination and crowdsourcing. It also points to the importance of establishing mechanisms for shared curatorship between the Wikimedia community and cultural institutions.
This article suggests we need to observe how French municipal libraries re-appropriate Twitter to maintain their mission and the relationship with their publics, particularly during the COVID-19 health crisis. The aim is to highlight how their speech towards their users is organized and structured on this platform. The aim of this study is to analyse, through hyperlink use, the complex articulation of logics, semiosis, postures, and issues which accompanies the communicational and mediational process which libraries have implemented during this time.
