Return to search

Media practices of civil society organisations : emerging paths to legitimation and long-term engagement

In this thesis I wish to analyse the complex relationship between actors’ media- related practices, legitimacy and long-term engagement. Based on a qualitative approach my research investigates two cases –Citizens for Europe, a civil society organisations involved in issues relating to European citizenship, and the Chaos Computer Club, one of the world’s oldest and largest hacker organisations. More concretely, through face-to-face interviews, participant observation and media analysis I analyse the role media practices play for the two organisations to establish legitimation and to sustain their political engagement over time. Accordingly, my thesis seeks to provide an empirically informed interpretive account of the meaning media-related practices have for actors’ political endeavours. From a more operationalised perspective, I am trying to make a convincing argument that practices circulating around and oriented towards media technologies and infrastructures play a configurative role for actors’ ability to co-determine democratic constellations. Instead of suggesting a straightforward causal chain my thesis conceptualises the entanglements between media practices, legitimation and long-term engagement as interlocking arrangements grounded in relational dynamics. Overall, my thesis aims to compliment existing research on the role media technologies and infrastructures play for the formation of political arrangements by looking at organisation-based engagement. In doing so, my research partially bridges a current research gap concerning the relationship between organisational actors’ media-related practices and their ability to establish legitimacy and to perpetuate political engagement over time.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:638064
Date January 2015
CreatorsKubitschko, Sebastian
PublisherGoldsmiths College (University of London)
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://research.gold.ac.uk/11401/

Page generated in 0.0023 seconds