Veronica Barassi
Mediated Resistance: Understanding the relation between Alternative Press Production and Political Belonging in Britain.
Veronica Barassi is a full time PhD student, working jointly with the Anthropology and the Media Departments at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Her research project is funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) and looks at how journalistic practices are used by campaigning organisations and political groups in Britain as powerful tools for self-definition and political action.
Veronica is currently conducting ethnographic research within the Cuba Solidarity Campaign. A British campaign organisation engaged since 1986 is in the production of the activist magazine CubaSì. By tracking the political and media networks in which the publication is embedded (e.g. Trade Unions’ magazines, Morning Star Daily, Liberation, Tribune etc.). Veronica is collecting a breadth of observations and testimonies, within different campaign organisations and the Trade Union movement in Britain, on the way in which alternative press publications enable people to construct their own political alliances, imaginaries and identities.
The relation between media and identity construction is a central issue of the information age, but the role of alternative media in the construction of minor political identities is largely under-investigated. This research project proposes to explore this relation by relying on the theories and methodologies of both anthropology and media studies. The aim is that of providing an original and cross-disciplinary reflection on alternative media and political identity; on the implications behind the mediated construction of transnational solidarity; and on people’s lived experience of the relation between digital and material - between print and electronic capitalism (Anderson, 1991; Appadurai, 1996).
Currently Veronica is organising, jointly with Melissa Pignatelli (SOAS) and Line Thomsen (Institute of Information Studies AArhus Univ. Denmark), the 'Mending the Gap': Reflections on Media Practice and Theory Symposium, scheduled for May 2008. The event is meant to further develop reflections on the many gaps between media theory and practice that have arisen during this year's successful one training day which was held at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, on the 12th of May 2007. From the upcoming year Veronica will also be a member of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network executive committee.