Vol. 10 No. 19 (2023): Collaborative media and citizen resilience: participatory communication in times of crisis
Coordinators: Sergio Villanueva Baselga (Universitat de Barcelona), Dafne Calvo (Universitat de València), and Alejandro Barranquero (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid).
The contemporary world is going through a time of enormous complexity and uncertainty. In addition to the multiple social crises that follow one after the other - crises such as the environmental crisis or those arising from the AIDS pandemic19 and the war in Ukraine - there is a changing media landscape in which the very concept of communication is overflowing, as well as the amount of stimuli and disconnected information that seek our attention. Faced with the acceleration of historical time and the perplexity that crises generate, the philosopher Daniel Innerarity explains:
Among the uncomfortable disproportions of our world is an ignorance very much characteristic of advanced society, which is produced by the excess of information and which has been described with neologisms such as infobasura or infoxication. The specialisation and fragmentation of knowledge has produced an increase in information that is accompanied by very modest progress in terms of our understanding of the world. Human knowledge doubles every five years. Thus, it is necessary that future generations learn not to accumulate information, but to know how to navigate it and produce new knowledge that brings it together (Innerarity, 2010, p. 25).
Social resilience, understood as the capacity of a community to grow and overcome in contexts of adversity (Keck and Sakdapolrak, 2013), has become a central notion for research on community communication in the pandemic and post-pandemic period. The main aim of this dossier is to reflect on the role of collaborative media and other forms of citizen communication in channelling and providing resilience to situations such as the current ecosocial, political and health crises. It also seeks to highlight experiences in which collaborative media, in the face of multi-crisis situations, have acted as a channel for support networks, tools for social empowerment and instruments of community support.
Apart from the traditional models of financing, organisation and action, the nomenclature "collaborative media" encompasses media and communication organisations that promote the active participation of citizens and local communities or communities of interest, in addition to promoting journalism committed to regional integration, welfare and human rights. The five articles published in this dossier, together with the two guest contributors, seek to articulate their reflection around adverse situations that contemporary societies have faced and continue to face, such as climate change and sustainability, socio-political conflicts and inequality, and health emergencies.
The first article, entitled "Collaborative artistic practices and citizen protest: Valencia 1991-2015", deals with artivism in the Valencian city, which in recent years has been characterised by neighbourhood opposition to the city's urban development plans. Through documentary analysis, the value of the practices and projects of various representative groups is studied. The main actions of these groups are identified as rallies, graphic material, artistic interventions and celebrations. These allow the collectives to carry out their objectives of making conflicts visible and creating new collective imaginaries about the territory.
The article "Collaborative co-creation: approaches during the coronavirus crisis and the restrictions on mobility" proposes collective creation as its main focus of study, in this case applied to the field of audiovisual media. A qualitative analysis of the pieces "They steal everything from us, except our rage" (LASTESIS collective, 2020) and "Reinvented" (Sonja Marzi, 2021) is carried out. The work concludes that both projects recover the elements of collective presence in the territory and reflection on the everyday environment and its related problems. Despite their differences, both are framed in response to the consequences of the closure of public spaces.
The following article, entitled "Participation, collaboration, and resilience in media cooperatives" seeks, through a systematic review of the literature, to identify, describe and classify collaborative and participatory modes and practices in media cooperatives throughout history. In doing so, it delves into the definition of collaborative media from a cooperative perspective, intervening in the epistemological debate surrounding the concept of collaborative media. Thus, he concludes that concepts such as collaboration and participation are central to the definition of these media and, therefore, make them potentially resilient organisations.
"El Salto: origin and consolidation strategy of a media outlet as a proposal for alternative communication" is the first of the articles dedicated to the study of media that, in reality, are organisations that articulate counter-hegemonic communication debates and practices. Since 2016, although with precedents in the 1980s, El Salto is probably the most ambitious alternative media that has existed in the Spanish state due to its multimedia will and its articulation of different languages, themes, templates or regional knowledge. Despite having undergone several restructurings -of workers or of the media that make it up-, the work highlights the resilience of the project by having tried and diversified different ways of financing and opening it up to audiences.
The case of "Social justice, communication and de-stigmatisation in mental health. The experience of Radio Nikosia" is that of a more specific medium, located in a hospital in Barcelona, and aimed at offering care, reflection and the right to communication for people psychiatrised for mental health reasons. Based on interviews and focus groups, the author of the work shows how Nikosia has managed to resist for more than 20 years, helping to break the stigma surrounding these communities and as a space for the construction of "profane knowledge" and alternative discourses on the psychic.
Finally, the two guest authors make reflections relevant to the theme of the dossier. On the one hand, Florencia Enghel from Jönköping University in Sweden reflects in her article "It’s problematic: Considerations on being informed base don women’s everyday practices in precarious times" on the daily routines of Argentinean women in relation to information during the COVID-19 crisis. Furthermore, the authors Hans-Jörg Trenz, Annett Heft, Michael Vaughan and Barbara Pfetsch from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence and the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society at the Freie Universitaet Berlin, in their article "Public sphere resilience in the global health crisis" discuss how the COVID-19 crisis has opened cracks in the media ecosystem by introducing experimental digital forms of communication in the media.
References
Innerarity, D. (2010). La democracia del conocimiento. Por una sociedad inteligente. Paídós.
Keck, M., y Sakdapolrak, P. (2013). What is social resilience? Lessons learned and ways forward. Erdkunde, 67(1), 5-19.
