How do media make the transnational?

The concept of transnationalism provides a frame for analysing how flows of people, ideas, symbols, commodities and objects constitute the shifting territories and (re)configurations of the social. In particular, the role of the media in creating, transforming and representing the contours and patterns of transnationality is central to our enquiries.  Through a range of research projects we are concerned with fundamental questions of meaning, belonging and participation in - and through - media, and in the possibilities and limits of the national in the face of emergent and destabilising social dynamics. The media provide the context through which we seek to understand the reframing of the nation in relation to migration, global communications networks, changing identities and conceptions of cultural work, mutable conceptualisations of citizenship and transformations in political culture and community.  Amongst the questions we ask in our projects are: How does the BBC World Service present and provide for different national publics and communities? How are different religions mediatised? In what ways is it possible to talk of media ‘cultures of diplomacy’? How do broadcasters and media institutions function as diasporic ‘contact zones’ and/or agents of cultural brokerage? More broadly, how are we to understand the role of the media in conflicts and debates over cultural, ethnic, religious and political identities

How are cosmopolitanism, community and citizenship being reframed?

The apparent supercession of the national by a transnational, global or cosmopolitan cultural outlook has prompted much discussion and controversy in social science. In order to propel the debate we have formulated a set of projects that examine more precisely how, and in what terms, the ‘cosmopolitan’ might be usefully employed as an explanatory concept in accounting for social change. Further, the utopian idea of a post or supra-national citizenship based on a benign global sensibility is being challenged by empirical work that examines the diverse conflicts underpinning citizenship in an age of accelerated (but patterned) migration, residual and emergent military conflict, and heightened concerns over (apparent) threats to national security. Debates on the cultural and creative boundaries of race and nation have particular salience here also. The questions we ask in our projects include: What is role of the armed forces in mediating questions of national identity and citizenship? What are the issues associated with the roots/routes, history and cultural ownership of Black British Jazz? How do ethnic and religious jokes, humour and comedy travel, translate and mutate in national and transnational social networks, contexts and genres? How are different cultural forms implicated in the imagining and re-imagining of diasporas and national belonging and what are the patterns of ‘racialization’ that shape identity and a sense of community?

How does media and cultural convergence make or unmake the national?

Convergence can be understood as the integration of different media technologies and platforms, the formation of networks for the production and transfer of media content and communications, cross-sector or institutional mergers amongst media providers and attempts to create and manage regulatory and legislative regimes. It may also refer to the individual who is positioned by, or able to manipulate, various digital/media affordances and contexts in acts of cultural and economic production. While much recent work by social scientists takes an overly optimistic view of the potential of convergence to solve traditional problems associated with informational drag, social and economic exclusion, mundane and alienating work or even volatile nationalisms and oppressive regimes – such claims are examined in the context of a set of projects that seek to qualify empirically, and expand theoretically, sociological understandings of media convergence in the digital age. Questions we address include: What forms of broadcasting regulation are appropriate for national and transnational media? What are the impacts of convergence for professional practices and organizations in the cultural and creative industries? To what extent is convergence implicated in the remaking and transformation of the nation-state and in the formation of transnational communities, contact zones and regimes of regulation and governance?