TORONTO, January 31, 2005 -- In the just released issue of The Canadian Journal of Communication, York University professor Bob Hanke develops a political economy of Indymedia practice.

 

In his article, “For a Political Economy of Idymedia Practice,” Hanke offers an analysis of the Ontario Independent Media Center as a website of social struggles against neoliberalism. This research adds to the growing body of current media research on alternative media in a networked world and democratic media activism.

 

Hanke draws upon the late Pierre Bourdieu's unique sociological perspective for his analysis. Based on a case study of the Ontario Independent Media Centre (ontario.indymedia.org), his research reveals that Indymedia practices are a simultaneously structured and spontaneous form of collective media work on the margins of the mainstream political and journalistic fields. Whether such experiments in democratic communication will develop, he suggests, will depend on whether Indymedia can become more central to media education. Studying small, radical media is as important as studying media giants, since this is were resistance to media monopoly will arise.

 

Bob Hanke has taught media and cultural studies at various universities before coming to York University in 2000. He is currently teaching Resistance and Subversion on the Internet, a 4^th year undergraduate course in the Communication Studies Program. He is on the Advisory Board of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (www.yorku.ca/topia) and has co-edited TOPIA 11--a special thematic issue on Technology and Culture. He is also a board member at large of the Canadian Communication Association and a cofounder of CAMERA--Committee on Alternative Media Experimentation, Research & Analysis. Their first video project is titled “Understanding Media Poll-itics.” His writings have appeared in many books and journals, most recently Marshall McLuhan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 2004) and Public 26.

 

The Canadian Journal of Communication provides a venue for Canadian research and scholarship in the field of communication and journalism studies, with an emphasis on research that has a distinctive Canadian flavor by virtue of choice of topic or by drawing on the legacy of Canadian theory and research. Visit the Canadian Journal of Communication website at www.cjc-online.ca.

 

Contact: Bob Hanke, 416-736-2100, ext.33826, bhanke@yorku.ca