CAMRI | Community, Media, and the City

Community, Media, and the City

A book chapter by Andrea Medrado, published by The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication

This chapter discusses community, media, and the city, with particular attention to contingent community media practices in dangerous urban spaces in Brazil. I reaffirm the familiar argument that, despite the assumption that media supposedly allow citizens to live free from dynamics of locality and community, urban communities remain extremely important for debates about mediated cities. I also pay particular attention to the role that community media can play in the process of community building, as well as having relevance for people’s belonging to the city. As I will show, rather than being reduced to documenting community folklore, different (offline and online) community media initiatives can serve citizens as practical (material) resources in their everyday lives structured by forms of inequality.

About Andrea Medrado

Andrea Medrado is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Media and Communication of the University of Westminster. She is also the Course Leader for the BA Digital Media and the leader for the Cultural Identities and Social Change theme at the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI). Her research focuses on digital media activism and artivism as tools for social change in the Global South and on creative and participatory approaches to analysing marginalised communities’ information security needs and everyday engagements with artificial intelligence (AI). Her book Media Activism, Artivism and the Fight Against Marginalisation in the Global South was published by Routledge in 2023. She has also published in leading academic journals and contributed to several edited book collections. Andrea is currently the Vice President of IAMCR, the largest international association in the field of media and communication.