This thesis examines the creation of the National Communications Commission (NCC), an independent media regulatory agency in Taiwan, in order to shed light on the relationship between media, state, and democracy in post-transition countries. This study positions the NCC as the key transformation of media reform during the political transition to democracy. On the one hand, it addresses the role of media in transitional societies and how political and industry power elites try to maintain control. On the other hand, it traces the rise of the ‘regulatory state’, a global trend towards regulatory reform, and investigates how the political environment in transitional countries may influence its development. This research is based on the analysis of case studies spanning issues of institutional legitimacy, media ownership, and convergence legislation, with the support of data collected by document analysis and interviews with actors in the policymaking process. The findings point to how Taiwan’s post-authoritarian political background has outweighed economic and technological factors as described in mainstream literature in giving rise to the creation of the agency. The analysis demonstrates that state intervention and politicised concepts of democratisation and independence of the agency both impair media regulatory capacities in transitional societies. More importantly, it is indicated that the threat to democracy has been shifting from authoritarian states to unfettered markets where concentration of media ownership and impediments to media reform through entrenched politico-economic networks have taken place. I question the popular discourse that democratisation is equal to the withdrawal of the state in media regulation, calling instead for active civic engagement to hold the agency accountable, scrutinise its performance, and make the media better serve the public.

This thesis considers how the mediation of poverty in Canada and the United Kingdom influences responses to the issue of poverty. The thesis focuses in particular on the issue dynamics concerning children as constructions of a “deserving poor” and immigrants as constructions of an “undeserving poor”. A frame analysis of mainstream news content in both countries demonstrates the extent to which individualizing and rationalizing frames dominate coverage, and that the publication of the news online is not leading to an expansion of discourses, as hoped. A frame analysis of alternative news coverage and coverage from the 1960s and 70s demonstrates significant absences of social justice frames and rights-based discourse in contemporary coverage. I suggest that mainstream news coverage narrows and limits the way poverty is talked about in a way that reinforces the dominance of neoliberalism and market-based approaches to the issue. Interviews with journalists, politicians, researchers and activists collectively indicate that getting media coverage is essential to gaining political attention in both countries. These interviews also reveal the power dynamics influencing the relationships between these actors and the way the issue of poverty is approached. I argue that while new media tools create new opportunities to share information, these tools are also creating new pressures by speeding up the working practices in mediated political centres in a way that forecloses potentials to challenge dominant news coverage and approaches to poverty. However, this cross-national comparison also reveals context-specific factors influencing poverty politics in each country. I conclude that this analysis and comparison of poverty issue dynamics reveals shortcomings in the democratic processes in both countries. Changing poverty coverage and approaches to the issue will require changing specific media and political practices.

In this project I explore everyday encounters with urban screens. I define urban screens as image interfaces that occupy (material) public urban space and represent other (symbolic) space. I conceptualise encounters with urban screens as events of media consumption in which passers-by are invited to communicate, without the possibility of pressing control buttons. I draw on the perspective of phenomenological geography, which understands place as an experiential dimension of space, sustained through habit, and on media domestication studies, which analyse how people incorporate media technologies and texts in familiar spaces. My grounded qualitative research encompasses four different screen placements: street and underground advertising panels, an architectural interface in a promenade, and a public art installation. A triangulation of my observations, participants’ diaries and depth- interviews suggests that passers-by compensate for the lack of material controls by ‘taming’ the screens (learning about their position, size, scale and mode of address), and by making use of screens in responding to various elements of the site-specific situations of passing by (presence of others, traffic, weather). Passers-by develop what I call ‘situational uses of urban screens’, such as managing interaction with unknown others, escapism, gathering potentially useful information, and focussing thoughts. I understand these ethnomethodological appropriations of screens as forms of pedestrian tactical resistance to institutional spatial arrangements. In order to maintain their practices of looking around and moving through routines, passers-by make their uses of screens habitual, and develop knowledge of the varieties of urban screen technologies and images. Through such intimate negotiations of technologically mediated urban spaces, people domesticate urban screens as taken-for-granted elements of their everyday spaces and landscapes of media consumption. I conclude that passers-by experience the changes of technologies and images as spatial changes, which make their habituation of mediated cities laborious and require their domestication of urban screens to be continuous.

This research operates in the context of a European political discourse, where the main concern is counter-cultural approaches to non-mandatory collaboration and contractual agreements. FLOSSTV (Free, Libre, Open Source Software TV) covers a broad range of practices, from television via documentary up to media arts productions. This thesis documents the endeavour to formulate a policy for FLOSS culture. FLOSSTV studies the impact of new intellectual property legislation on media production, as well as conceptions and applications of collective authorship and alternative licensing schemes. FLOSSTV sets out to explore methods that can facilitate media and arts practitioners wishing to engage in collaborative media productions. The thesis sets out to investigate the theories and histories of collaborative media and arts productions in order to set the ground for an exploration of the tools, technologies and aesthetics of such collaborations. The FLOSSTV thesis proposes a set of contracts and policies that allow for such collaborations to develop. It is through practice that this research explores FLOSS culture, including its methods, licensing schemes and technologies. In order to focus the research within the field of FLOSSTV I initiated the practice-based Deptford.TV pilot project as the central research experiment for the FLOSSTV thesis. DVD ONE contains a series of films produced collaboratively for Deptford.TV that express the characteristics and contractual arrangements of FLOSS culture. Deptford.TV is an online audiovisual database primarily collecting media assets around the Deptford area, in South­East London, UK. Deptford.TV functions as an open, collaborative platform that allows artists, film-makers, researchers and participants of the local workshops in and around Deptford, and also beyond Deptford, to store, share, re-edit and redistribute their footage and projects. The open and collaborative nature of the Deptford.TV project demonstrates a form of shared media practice in two ways: audiences become producers by submitting their own footage, and the database enables the contributors to interact with each other. Through my practice-lead research project Deptford.TV I argue that, by supporting collaborative methods and practices, FLOSS (Free, Libre, Open Source Software) can empower media and arts practitioners to collaborate in production and distribution processes of media and arts practices.

This thesis provides an integrated analysis of formal and informal distribution networks for East Asian Cinema in the UK through interviews and ethnographic-style research. It examines what motivates and shapes the acquisition decisions of distributors in these contexts and how these motivations might conflict, interact with, or complement one another. Whilst existing literature has focused on formal distribution and ‘piracy’ as distinct phenomena, this thesis considers both in conjunction with each other and also uncovers the distinct social contexts of each environment. Through anti-piracy discourse, the positions and priorities of ‘pirates’ and the ‘industry’ are repeatedly constructed as unequivocally distinct and oppositional. However, on the basis of my research, I argue that these seemingly opposed groups -- professional distributors and filesharers -- are more similar than we might imagine. The connections between the online and offline distributors can be noted in a number of ways. First, the actions of distributors within formal and informal networks involve complex social and cultural interactions rather than purely economic considerations. Second, an individual’s position in a socially imagined ‘knowledge community’ is perceived to be more significant than economic interest in motivating the activities of distributors within both formal and informal channels. Third, by applying Molteni and Ordanini’s principle of socio-network effects, I argue that distributors online and offline are engaged in a symbiotic relationship where each party can be said to benefit socially and culturally, if not necessarily economically, from the actions of each other. Overall, this thesis argues that social contexts of distribution in formal and informal settings shape the distribution process. Indeed, rather than just representing the movement of an economic commodity, the act of film distribution also mediates and facilitates the social and professional relationships of distributors across both sectors.

This thesis explores the affective, relational, and intercorporeal intensities circulating in three of London’s queer performance club spaces. Duckie, Bird Club and Wotever have staged queer cabaret, burlesque and live-art influenced performance work in bar and nightclub settings for many years, and yet have received little academic attention. Located at the intersection of cultural studies, performance studies, and body theory, this thesis serves not only to archive this rich and yet under-explored scene of creative endeavour, but also to bring into dialogue concerns and approaches from these divergent disciplines that appear to coincide within these settings. It asks two complimentary overarching questions: a) What can the debates around subjectivity, affect and embodiment emerging from body theory bring to our interpretation and understanding of performance practice and spectatorship? b) What can a consideration of performance bring to the ongoing interest across the humanities in the workings of affect and embodied experiences that challenge the rational, bounded, autonomous subject? Through autoethnographic research, comprising performance analysis, one-to-one and group interviews with performers and regulars of the three clubs and extensive participation in both the social and performance aspects of this ‘scene’, I argue that much is to be gained from this under-explored crossover. Engaging theory on bodily integrity, relationality, trauma, fantasy and desire and the public sphere I investigate the workings of affect within these domains, and the complex intersections between affect and identity politics, performativity, subjectification and world-making. I trace the modes of subjectivity and belonging that appear to be enabled within these milieux, and address why it is that these debates become pertinent here. Shifting our attention to the affective register of what is occurring within queer performance, I argue, enables a consideration of experiences, subjectivities and performances that might otherwise seem paradoxical, impossible or illegible.

This thesis examines the shifting conditions of the material and technological properties of the object of film and subsequently of the idea of cinema, in the light of the transition from analogue to digital technologies. I suggest that this technological transition has ontological dimensions, which I examine by looking at spaces and places that encompass this transition, materially and conceptually. The study argues that the nature of film and cinema is multiple, in continuous states of ‘becoming’. The anchor of this study is post-Actor Network theorist Annemarie Mol’s philosophical argument that objects ‘come into being’ according to the practices and sites in which they are placed. The thesis examines situated practice-based interactions between the two technologies, which shape relationships of power, replacement, exchange and collaboration. I explore those issues at four specific institutional sites: the gallery, focusing on three moving image exhibitions in London, the British Film Institute’s Archive in Berkhamsted, LUX, the UK agency of artists’ moving image distribution and collection, and the movie theatre’s projection room that gradually displays only digital films. This survey examines the situated practices of presentation, exhibition, print checking, archiving, restoration and theatrical projection of film. The aim of this study is to present a multiple object and a multiple idea that is defined not merely by technology, but rather by sites and in particular their operational practices, objectives and organization. By evaluating how analogue and digital technologies interplay in these sites, the study aims to highlight issues of film’s and cinema’s multiplicity that unfolds and shifts both in space and time. The investigated practices evolve in electronic spaces, physical sites and particular locations. Furthermore, they expose different temporalities for analogue and digital film and indicate cinema’s virtual nature to be transcending in time. The situated practices unite and divide the analogue and digital technologies, exposing a manipulative relationship between tangible space, formed by the mechanical apparatus of projection and network space, marked by the digital’s temporal and spatial ubiquity. At the same time, cinema is actualized in measurable time, while its phenomenon is formulated in the continuous movement and differentiation of duration.

This thesis interrogates the relationship between Mexican nationalism, maize agriculture and contemporary technoscience. My aim is to unlock a phenomenon that can at times take the shape of a reactive nationalism, while positioning itself as a defense of maize agriculture. Since 1999, a growing coalition of Mexican and international activists has denounced the transgenic "contamination" of Mexican maize agriculture. In the process, activists have identified transgenic maize as the instrument of a foreign assault on a sovereign entity, namely the nation itself – which "native maize" symbolizes in a very tangible way. Rather than being positioned as a mere instrument of foreign powers, in my argument agricultural biotechnology is seen as a non-deterministic event that calls for a critical assessment of national narratives around agriculture, science, technology and technoscience. In addition to developing such a critical assessment, I set out to explore the ethical and political promises of refiguring the activist use of the term "contamination" so that the latter is understood to pertain genetically to identity itself, including the maize-based identity that some Mexicans invoke in their nationalistic opposition to transgenic maize. Drawing on specific contributions from post-Marxist political theory, media and cultural studies and feminist technoscience, I position "genetic contamination" as a critical and creative alternative to the reproduction of nationalist identifications. An acknowledgment of the ineradicability of antagonism, a rigorous attention to contextual specificities and a materialist commitment to the pursuit of democracy in the technoscientific world all inform my engagement with the nationalist narratives in the context of technoscience, understood here as "a form of life, a generative matrix" (Haraway, Modest_Witness 50).

Public service broadcasting, central to British cultural life, is facing ongoing uncertainties brought about by digitisation, media convergence and broader political, social and economic shifts. By focusing on BBC Four, BBC’s digital channel for arts, culture and ideas, this thesis examines how these transformations affect the institution’s quality provision and cultural value. The central argument of the thesis is that the BBC’s approach to cultural value has discursively and structurally changed in response to wider economic and ideological shifts. The research takes a qualitative case study approach, which encompasses historical, discursive and textual analyses as well as interviews with the key BBC Four staff. It is divided into two sections. The first part of the research is based on the secondary literature and offers broad scholarly accounts about how the concept of culture has so far been approached, and addresses the lack of sustained academic debates about television’s cultural value. It further situates the analysis of BBC Four within historical institutional and policy debates over the purpose and role of public service broadcasting, its quality and cultural standards. As the object of study is a contemporary phenomenon, the second section is empirical, largely based on interviews, and pays attention to the channel’s organisation and texts. The quality of BBC Four’s provision, the thesis argues, is articulated through an “internal cultural geography”, a phrase coined to situate the channel relationally within multiple and complex institutional contexts, including the BBC’s shift to multichannel, digital platforms; the formation of the BBC television portfolio; the branding and marketing of its channel identity; and the channel’s prominent curatorial role within the BBC’s digitisation of the television archive. The thesis concludes that the cultural value of BBC Four is conveyed relationally, with the channel being defined as a place where cultural programmes can be found.

Children occupy an ever-more prominent position in public discourse in late-modern Britain, with politicians, news media and other key definers consistently depicting childhood as inherently problematic. Popular portrayals of juveniles tend to conceive of them as being subject to multifarious ‘risks’, with younger children, in particular, considered vulnerable to all manner of threats – from illnesses and medical emergencies to technological perils to the predations of deviant elements in society. When not threatened themselves, moreover, they are frequently depicted as presenting a menace to others, in a manner redolent of earlier moral panics about subversive youth sub-cultures. Drawing on a rich literature of research into news-making, textual framing and media reception, this thesis uses a triangulated methodology to explore the interplay between contemporary newspaper journalists, their sources of news, the narratives they weave, and (actual or potential) members of their audiences. It argues that the dominant, at times paradoxical, positioning of children – by press and public alike – as either or both of victims and threats amounts to an endemic ‘juvenile panic’, which is rooted in a continuum of ambivalences about minors that can be traced through history. This simmering state of panic boils over whenever it finds purchase in singular dramatic events – fuelled by the demands of a commercially driven media; journalists’ pragmatic reliance on official sources with fear-promoting agendas; and the public’s appetite for a good horror story. It is further argued that a particular focus on the dangers posed by ‘familiar strangers’ (adult or juvenile) acts as a displacement for deep-seated concerns stemming from recent changes in Britain’s society and economy - notably growing personal insecurity and the slow decline of social trust.