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In this paper, I intend to explore the role played by reflexivity in grounding a more critical perspective when designing, implementing and analysing participatory digital media research. To carry out this methodological reflection, I will present and discuss a recently concluded research project on young people’s game-making in an after-school programme targeting Latin American migrants in London/UK. I will pay special attention to how my subjectivities influenced planning, data generation and analysis of this programme, and to how context, lived experiences, curricular decisions and interpersonal relationships shaped the kinds of knowledge produced through this research. Findings emerging from this experience included relevant dissonances between curricular design/decisions and the use of participatory approaches in game-making, and the limitations of traditional analytical categories within the Social Sciences field (e.g., gender and intersectionality) to understanding subjectivities expressed through game-making. This study offers relevant insights into the place of reflexivity in research on digital media production by young people by highlighting its complexity and by calling for more critical and less homogenising approaches to this type of research.

This paper explores a game-making programme for 14 Latin American migrants aged 13-18 in London/UK, carried out between October/2017-January/2018, where I investigated the relationships between game conventions, platforms and personal preferences in the curation of fluid identities through game production. Participants presented varying levels of affinity with games linked both to access issues and to other specific elements (e.g. perception of games in contemporary culture, gender). Questionnaires, observations, unstructured/semistructured interviews and gaming archives were employed to explore this participatory initiative and data was analysed through Multimodal Sociosemiotics. Findings remarked how shared understandings about digital games can find their way into platforms and act as “cultural-technical gatekeepers”, supporting or hindering the engagement with game-making of those often perceived as outsiders to gaming culture. This gatekeeping happens when there are “creative dissonances” between, for example, personal preferences and platforms aligned to normative/mainstream genres. These dissonances, however, can end up fostering subversive designs, contravening gaming conventions and potentially challenging traditional gaming boundaries. This insight is relevant for understanding “cultural-technical constraints” and subversive/non-mainstream game-making, especially in relation to innovation and appropriation of game-making resources/strategies by non-mainstream groups.

This article investigates the relationship between young people’s game-making practices and meaning-making in videogames. By exploring two different games produced in a game-making club in London through a multimodal sociosemiotic approach, the author discusses how semiotic resources and modes were recruited by participants to realize different discourses. By employing concepts such as modality truth claims and grammar, he examines how these games help us reflect on the links between intertextuality, hegemonic gaming forms and sign-making through digital games. He also outlines how a broader approach to what has been recently defined as the ‘procedural’ mode by Hawreliak in Multimodal Semiotics and Rhetoric in Videogames (2018) can be relevant for promoting different and more democratic forms of meaning-making through videogames.

In the last decades, digital games have moved from niche to mainstream. As more people play, talk about, and engage with these artifacts, they have become an important part of contemporary cultures, giving rise to game literacy—the set of skills needed to meaningfully engage with video games. While the potentials of game literacy have, to some extent, been already discussed in the literature, we have not adequately discussed the need for a game literacy that problematizes the sociocultural dimensions of gaming, including the hegemonic, exclusionary rationales implicitly disseminated through mainstream gaming. In this chapter, I outline a decolonial model for game literacy, remarking how the reflection about the gaming circuits of production and dissemination should be part of any initiative that aims at dealing with critical and creative competences towards gaming, and how these are crucial for any citizen in contemporary societies.

Modern Malaysia was established in 1963 following a drawn-out struggle against British interests which had occupied territory on Penang and Singapore and the Straits of Malacca in 1786, 1819 and 1824 respectively. In 1867 these outposts came under the control of the British Colonial Office and were governed as a Crown Colony. Although Britain did not directly colonise the Malay States, which remained legally autonomous, it imposed effective administrative control over Malaya and the Borneo territories from the late 1870s until the Japanese occupation in 1942.

For any exposition of the television news medium to hold merit itbecomes imperative to glide into the past to recover its earliest antecedent –the newsreel. Newsreel presentation involved an intimate relationshipbetween its producers and events that print reporters had never faced: it wasentirely dependent on pictures that required the camera to be in positionbefore they unfolded (Montague, 1938: 49). Thus, the early producers ofnewsreels discovered that at times when there was a lack of any worthwhileor pictorial news it was possible to create it. It was also possible to ‘experiment’ with news. Newsreels in the United States, therefore, experi-mented with everything: news borrowed from newspapers, studies by collegeprofessors, animated diagrammatical representations of a volatile stockmarket, and so on. Since newsreels were exhibited before drama perfor-mances and film shows in theatres, a great degree of dramatisation andsensationalism was not deemed out of place. They too became part of theentertainment media.

This chapter explores the contradiction between two sets of responses to the so-called K-serials, earlier, largely condemnatory ones, and more recent, largely laudatory ones. The chapter aims to understand this contradiction and resolve it. It does so by showing how K-serials were a definitive break at that specific point in time from the ones that had immediately preceded them, especially in bringing to the fore the bahu (daughter-in-law) of Hindu urban extended families. It traces the complex place of gender in the discourse of the Hindu right and explores the strong debt that the K-serials owe to the ideological constructions of the woman and the family by Hindu nationalism. It argues therefore that the consequences of celebrating agency and empowerment in a right wing milieu-as some recent scholarship has done-ends up advocating for a limited and exclusionary form of female agency.

Television programme format adaptation is becoming an increasingly significant phenomenon in India as it is in many other countries with an active domestic television industry. Some obvious successes stand out in recent years, such as Kaun Banega Crorepati, the licensed adaptation of Celador’s global format success Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, and C.A.T.S., a licensed Hindi version of the US detective series Charlie’s Angels. However, sensitivity to local cultural nuances has been critical to their popular reception by Indian audiences. Yet despite a few high-profile licensed adaptations or copycatting, there are far more instances of unlicensed adaptations or cloning, sometimes subtle, other times not.

Animation allows for the creation of mediatic spaces that strengthen prevailing ideologies of masculinity and femininity. Manhood seems to operate as a key point of reference in the creation of televised animation across Latin America, especially by elevating certain heroic cultural narratives. Through a review of 21 television series, produced between 2008 and 2018, this chapter examines the portrayals of femininity and masculinity in some of the most widely broadcast animated series from the region. As a norm, Latin American illustrators adhere to the tradition of depicting female figures as secondary characters, as leading characters with a certain degree of autonomy, or as subaltern, considerate, and supportive figures. By contrast, male figures are portrayed as strong, daring, independent, and primary characters, often destined to lead their families and communities, and save their weaker friends that are typically female characters.

This chapter explores the ways in which the portrayal of children in Palestinian screen content compares with the positioning of children in leading pan-Arab children’s channels. Using critical discourse analysis, it compares the definition and representation of childhood in three Arabic language texts (two magazine shows and one animation), and examines the ways in which the texts construct narratives of childhood and whether they reproduce or challenge hegemonic definitions of childhood. The chapter analyses the language used to address the child audience and the ways in which adult–child relations are depicted. The chapter concludes that while there are some characteristics unique to Palestinian programming, the positioning of children and the “modes of address” are similar in all three programmes, and there are common assumptions and idealizations of childhood. However, there is some evidence that the Emirati animation analysed challenges dominant (adult-generated) definitions of childhood present in Arab societies by presenting childhood as a dynamic space of empowerment

This chapter analyzes the reflections of Turkey’s neoconservative and neoliberal politics of gender on daytime television. The focus is on Bridal House, a popular daytime TV show in Turkey which interpellates women as domestic subjects competing with other women to prove their domestic abilities, particularly the ability to navigate the etiquette of domestic consumption. Hierarchies are instigated among women through symbolic battles on “tasteful” consumption, and the marital household surfaces as a space of constant regulation where women strive to be ideal housewives. By analyzing Bridal House through a Bourdieusian framework, this chapter traces the representations of the “ideal female subject” along neoconservative and neoliberal lines, and demonstrates the ways in which symbolic violences are enacted on women in contemporary Turkey’s daytime TV culture.

The internet has impacted on how media organisations do journalism. Many media organisations both print and broadcast now have an online presence to reach out to fragmented audiences that have migrated to online platforms. Television stations have increasingly embraced the use of digital (online) media to gain better access to their audiences in terms of content distribution and audience engagement. The rise of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram have given journalists and media organisations the ability to reach their audiences immediately, with the added benefit of audience responses which come almost immediately. The use of new digital media has created platforms for news stations to share digital clips of news items or excerpts of news programmes to keep the audiences informed or enticed by the highlights.

The Paramilitary Hero on Turkish Television: A Case Study on Valley of the Wolves explores the representation and reception of nationalism and masculinity in Turkey through an examination of the popular television serial, Valley of the Wolves which has been aired on Turkish television since 2003. This detailed examination of the show demonstrates a particular discourse of nationalism, namely the Turkish Islam synthesis embedded in a gender-specific regime in which the paramilitary hero is placed at the centre. The study draws on thirty-seven in-depth interviews with viewers of the programme from different social backgrounds. These viewers read the serial from various perspectives in the light of their gendered experiences, suggesting that the relationship between text and audience is not necessarily predetermined by the former, but is rather constructed through an interdiscursive process. The book also examines the pleasures of the “contesting” readers of Valley of the Wolves, drawing on the audience interviews, and argues that critical approaches to a particular media text do not present a barrier to audience pleasures.

Fusing audience research and ethnography, the book presents a compelling account of women's changing lives and identities in relation to the impact of the most popular media culture in everyday life: television. Within the historically-specific social conditions of Korean modernity, Youna Kim analyzes how Korean women of varying age and class group cope with the new environment of changing economical structure and social relations. The book argues that television is an important resource for women, stimulating them to research their own lives and identities. Youna Kim reveals Korean women as creative, energetic and critical audiences in their responses to evolving modernity and the impact of the West. Based on original empirical research, the book explores the hopes, aspirations, frustrations and dilemmas of Korean women as they try to cope with life beyond traditional grounds. Going beyond the traditional Anglo-American view of media and culture, this text will appeal to students and scholars of both Korean area studies and media and communications studies.

Satellite television has not only provided migrant communities with stronger ties to their home countries but also enabled second-generation migrants in particular to know more about their country of origin beyond their family ties. The aim of this chapter is to explore the ways in which Turkish television contributes towards the making of the transnational identity of the “twice minority” group of Alevi Kurds through what I call mediatised culturalisation. Drawing on 17 in-depth interviews that I conducted with the second-generation members of the Alevi Kurdish community in London in 2016, I explore the role of Turkish television in contesting the boundaries of transnational social imaginaries of the second-generation viewers.

Since the1980s, the television (TV) drama has proved to be one of the most dominant formats on Turkish TV channels and occupied major slots on primetime throughout the 1990s and 2000s. As Internet penetration grew, on-demand services transformed audiences’ expectations of TV series. Internet series first became a trend on YouTube in 2013, and Netflix began broadcasting in Turkey at the beginning of 2016. Its entry to the sector triggered video-on-demand suppliers like Blu TV and Puhu TV which are digital enterprises of Doğan and Doğusṃ Holdings. Blu TV announced their first original project in 2017, Masum (Innocent), which was a big-budget series that included famous actors. In the same year, Puhu TV released their first original, Fi (Phi). Finally, Netflix launched their first original production in Turkey, Hakan: The Protector, in 2018. This chapter focuses on the implications of convergence for the production and distribution of TV dramas and considers the changes in the sector as television broadcasting shifted to new media platforms in Turkey.

This chapter traces the evolution of the Turkish Public Service Broadcaster with a focus on its transnationalization. Drawing parallels between the changing dynamics in politics, culture, and media in Turkey; contemporary cosmopolitan media cultures; and the continuities and changes in Turkish Radio and Television Corporation’s (henceforth TRT) identity as a public service broadcaster, I shed light on the ways in which TRT has been engaging in transnational broadcasts since the beginning of 1990s. For this I elaborate on the ways in which transnational broadcasting processes in Turkey have been influenced by media transnationalization around the world. I discuss two different incentives behind TRT’s transnational endeavors. First, I elaborate on TRT’s attempts at engaging with the Turkish diaspora around the world; later, I articulate how, in more recent years, TRT sets out to exert a Turkish cultural presence in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The chapter aims to draw a general portrait of the concept of transnational broadcasting in Turkey with a specific focus on the country’s public service broadcaster, TRT.

This chapter examines the social transformation of the television audience of rural Turkey. Villages near a metropolitan area, which were subject to an administrative decision to be relocated, were the focus of my fieldwork 30 years ago. Several visits between 1987 and 2019 to the same location, which is inhabited by television viewers and non-viewers alike, yielded an insightful mapping of engagement with popular culture via television at the periphery in Turkey from a historical perspective. While rural inhabitants are busy with daily labor in the countryside and are not keen on watching television, they are nonetheless aware of and connected to new, nationwide cultural trends and social changes. By reflexively discussing these experiences in ethnographic fieldwork on television habits and reception in rural Turkey over a 30-year span, I avoid the traps of modern-traditional and urban-rural binaries, allowing for an exploration of the role of television in mediating social change in the rural context and thus an analysis of the various complex layers and processes of mediatization among rural audiences.

The 1990s’ popular televised journalistic/history documentaries have played a vital role in the making of political television culture, society of political spectacle, and the production of popular history and memory in Turkey. Despite their importance, these documentaries did not attract enough scholarly attention. By focusing on arguably the most popular and impactful journalistic/history documentaries of Turkey’s history, developed by Mehmet Ali Birand in the 1990s, I will assess the role of television in teaching, telling, and writing the political history. In doing so, I will also contextualize the form and discourse of these documentary series within historical juncture of globalization and neoliberalization of television as well as the country’s political economy.

In contrast with radio broadcasting, which began in 1927, television started remarkably late in Turkey. When the country’s sole public service broadcaster, Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT), was established in 1964 and all of the radio transmitters were transferred to the Corporation, even radio broadcasting was not successfully institutionalized to catch up with its Western counterparts. For a very young Republic like Turkey, radio was an integral part of the modernization and nation-building agenda of the early ruling elite and therefore it institutionalized as a part of the machinery of the state, under very strict state control. Much known indispensable merits of autonomy and independence attributed to the historical public service broadcasting model in Europe were hardly appreciated and supported in Turkey. Television broadcasting also had its share from this negative perception and had to face similar obstructions as radio from the beginning. This chapter traces the history of content regulation in television broadcasting by situating the political controversies at the center at different times from the 1960s until today. Unfortunately, as the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun, not in Turkey.