Free speech drives conflicts about who speaks, but who is heard is rarely considered. As digital media push deeper into our lives, free speech involves not only limits, but seemingly limitless communication, transforming what is at stake on tech platforms and in political protests, in universities and media debate.What Is Free Speech For? examines the gap between abstract discussions of free speech and communication in democracies with abundant speech but very little listening. It ...

How can we make media anti-racist?The rise of the far right, the impacts of Covid-19, and the mediated evidence of racist police violence have challenged the dominant complacency that racism was a thing of the past. We are now witnessing the renewed anti-racist commitment of social movements and the rising authoritarianism that seeks to suppress it. Rather than making media ‘less racist’, how can media systems be transformed in ways that actively challenge the production of racism?...

It is easy to say "I have no prejudices", "I'm not racist, so it has nothing to do with me", "I didn't invite those refugees". It is hard to say "I may not be to blame for what happened in the past but I want to take responsibility for making sure it doesn't continue in the future". The Education Pack "all different - all equal" was originally produced in 1995 as an educational resource for the European youth campaign against racism, antisemitism, xenophobia and intolerance. Soon after its...

Public service broadcasting is in the process of evolving into 'public service media' as a response to the challenges of digitalization, intensive competition and financial vulnerability. While many commentators regard public service as being in transition, a central dimension of its mission - to integrate and unify the nation while respecting and representing plurality - is being reemphasized and re-legitimated in a political climate where the politics of migration and cultural diversity ...

The question of free speech is never far from the headlines and frequently declared to be in crisis. Starting from the observation that such debates so often focus on what can and cannot be said in relation to race, Gavan Titley asks why racism has become so central to intense disputes about the status and remit of freedom of speech.Is Free Speech Racist? moves away from recurring debates about the limits of speech to instead examine how the principle of free spee...

Across the West, something called multiculturalism is in crisis. Regarded as the failed experiment of liberal elites, commentators and politicians compete to denounce its corrosive legacies; parallel communities threatening social cohesion, enemies within cultivated by irresponsible cultural relativism, mediaeval practices subverting national 'ways of life' and universal values.This important new book challenges this familiar narrative of the rise and fall of multiculturalism by ch...

Digital media have radically altered understandings of racism, so that an issue that has too often been assumed to belong to the past has been thrust into contemporary mainstream debates, news and popular culture. In light of the importance of traditional communications and social media to such events as Brexit in the UK and the Trump Presidency in the US, it is imperative for students of media and public discourse to examine the role played by the media in the generation, circulation and ...

As the world looked on in horror at the Paris terror attacks of January and November 2015, France found itself at the centre of a war that has split across nations and continents. The attacks set in motion a steady creep towards ever more repressive state surveillance, and have fuelled the resurgence of the far right across Europe and beyond, while leaving the left dangerously divided. These developments raise profound questions about a number of issues central to contemporary debates, inc...

Well-informed, thoughtful and transnational in its perspectives, Downing and Husband′s work is likely to become the key text in the field. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the politics of race and representation.- Professor Daya K. Thussu, University of WestminsterThe media play a diverse and significant role in the practical expression of racism and in the everyday politics of ethnicity. Written by two veterans of research on ...

Palestinian Civil Society examines the development of civil society in the Arab Middle East and the impact of western donors, with particular reference to the Palestinian case. Looking at the evolution of Palestinian civil society organizations from sociological, historical, legal, and institutional perspectives, the book sheds light on the involvement of donors in Palestine, and the effect that aid has had on Palestinian civil society at a social, political and ideological level....

In 2004, the French government instituted a ban on the wearing of "conspicuous signs" of religious affiliation in public schools. Though the ban applies to everyone, it is aimed at Muslim girls wearing headscarves. Proponents of the law insist it upholds France's values of secular liberalism and regard the headscarf as symbolic of Islam's resistance to modernity. The Politics of the Veil is an explosive refutation of this view, one that bears important implications for us all....

The public sphere provides a domain of social life in which public opinion is expressed by means of rational discourse and debate. Habermas linked its historical development to the coffee houses and journals in England, Parisian salons and German reading clubs. He described it as a bourgeois public sphere, where private people come together and where they turn from a politically disempowered bourgeoisie into an effective political agent - the public intellectual. With communication network...