Overview

This book is about democracy and communication. The media and popular culture are often identified as bearing primary responsibility for the decline of active citizenship and the decay of democratic institutions. Media culture is charged with eroding the capacity of citizens to trust in public institutions and with encouraging widespread civic disengagement. In this book Clive Barnett critically evaluates the conceptual underpinnings of such widespread judgements. In doing so he provides an innovative and theoretically informed exploration of the interface between culture, political economy, and public life. Through a triangulation of the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, and Habermas, he argues that deconstruction, poststructuralism, and critical theory converge around shared concerns for the possibilities of democratic public life in a globalising age. Drawing on cultural and media studies, human geography, political philosophy and social theory, and research on media policy and politics in the United States, Europe and South Africa, he demonstrates the indispensability of concepts of the public sphere, representation, and spatiality to the analysis of the politics of cultural democratisation. This book combines critical conceptualisation with policy analysis, and connects cultural studies to normative political theory. Clive Barnett demonstrates the importance of developing theoretical arguments in connection with case studies for understanding the contemporary interactions between media, culture and democracy.

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9780748613991

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Reviews

The first chapter, on 'Spaces of representation', gives a virtuosic airing to questions of representation! [this book contains] impressive scholarship! an essential text that deserves to be widely read and appreciated. An intellectually stimulating work, which critically combines an assessment of ideas with an evaluation of policies at the interface of media, culture and democracy. -- Cultural Geographies The first chapter, on 'Spaces of representation', gives a virtuosic airing to questions of representation! [this book contains] impressive scholarship! an essential text that deserves to be widely read and appreciated. An intellectually stimulating work, which critically combines an assessment of ideas with an evaluation of policies at the interface of media, culture and democracy.

Author Information

Clive Barnett is Reader in Human Geography at The Open University. He is author of Culture and Democracy (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), and co-editor of Spaces of Democracy (Sage, 2004) and Geographies of Globalisation (Sage, 2008).

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