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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.

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.

Despite great heterogeneity, the vast continent of Africa and the diverse people of its countries and diasporas have often been represented through the most reductive, essentialising, and denigrating paradigms— a process that Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi has referred to as “the danger of a single story”. One of the most dangerous of these paradigms is the developmentalist one, which shoehorns Africa into a western, capitalist teleological framework that overlooks and denies Africa’s production of and participation in forms of leisure, pleasure and entertainment.

In this updated edition of his acclaimed and award-winning study, Stephen Bourne takes a personal look at the history of black people in popular British film and television. He documents, from original research and interviews, the experiences and representations which have been ignored in previous media books about people of African descent. There are chapters about Paul Robeson, Newton I. Aduaka, soap operas and much more - as well as several useful appendices and suggestions for further reading.

'One of the most important books on race, representation and politics to come along in a decade' - Henry Giroux, Penn State University Representing Black Britain offers a critical history of Black and Asian representation on British television from the earliest days of broadcasting to the present day.

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.

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.

Sport has had a symbiotic relationship with television for decades, as it has always been one of the most marketable visual products for the medium. The new visual media technologies that have been introduced since the 1970s have altered this relationship greatly by incrementally commodifying sport at each step. One of the most crucial aspects of this relationship is globalisation, which initially depended on satellite television and took sport’s hyper-commodification to a whole new level. Turkey, which went through a massive transformation to a neoliberal rule following a bloody coup d’etat in 1980 that practically razed the whole social and political structure, has since become an important example of the roles of sport and television in an aggressively neoliberal setting. This chapter aims to explain why televised sport has had a remarkable role in the sociopolitical transformation of Turkey since the 1980 coup.

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.

Police procedural has been historically perceived as a dominantly masculine genre for continually revolving around the investigations of male police officers. In accordance with the patriarchal norms that pervade Turkish society, local variations of the police procedural genre have conveniently appropriated this globally known convention and left little room for female detectives in their narratives. However, whenever they got a chance to be included in this male-dominated universe, female detectives have been frequently depicted as relatively independent women but also submitted to the traditional norms of womanhood in an ambivalent manner. This chapter examines this hesitant position of female police detectives in three contemporary Turkish police procedurals, Kanıt (The Evidence, 2010–2013), Cinayet (The Killing, 2014) and Sṃahsiyet (Personality, 2018), by building connections between the interest of police procedural genre in feminist debates in the global context and the influence of this interest on local variations.

The marriage show was a popular reality show format that invited people to find their soulmate and marry on live television in Turkey. Based on ethnographic fieldwork which took place in the show’s studio between 2011 and 2012, this chapter explores female participants’ investment of their trust in the show. While being reluctant about finding a spouse on television, women take on registers of safety, familiarity, and secrecy to navigate the show as a safe venue. This endeavor also involved women’s safeguarding of themselves on their way to marriage. The fragility of trust in the show, therefore, indicates how women foresee risks and yet strive for securing happiness and safety in marriage in general. This affective tension, at a larger scale, is related to the increased sense of insecurity at a global scale, and the systematic failure of the family to provide the safe living environment it promises in the Turkish context.

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.

La production de fictions sérielles turques est en constant développement. Ces fictions ont un très grand succès au niveau local (Tanriöver, 2011 ; Öztürkmen, 2018), avant d’être exportées au-delà des frontières turques depuis les années 2000, d’abord dans des pays sous l’influence culturelle de l’ancien Empire ottoman (à savoir les Balkans et le Moyen-Orient, puis au-delà (en Amérique latine, en Chine, au Pakistan, en Inde, au Bangladesh, etc.), faisant de la Turquie un leader mondial en matière de production et d’exportation. La Grèce est devenue un grand consommateur de fictions sérielles turques et les forts taux d’audience que ces dernières y réalisent ont conduit certains chercheurs à débattre du soft power turc. Plus précisément, en se basant sur les activités des fans des feuilletons en question (comme le tourisme en direction de la Turquie), certains ont soutenu que le visionnage des feuilletons turcs entraîne une amélioration des relations gréco-turques (Paris, 2013). En parallèle, de nombreux articles journalistiques, aussi bien en Grèce que dans d’autres pays, analysent le succès de ces feuilletons auprès du public grec comme une réussite diplomatique du gouvernement turc (Moore, 2013 ; Dimitrakopoulos, 2020).

This chapter examines the intersection of popular culture and populism in Turkey by focusing on the TV show Payitaht Abdulhamid. Our motivation to analyze the recent TV series Payitaht Abdulhamid stems from our interest in the instrumental mobilization of popular culture for the Turkish government’s dual desire to both establish cultural hegemony and consolidate its populist style of government. Our analysis reveals that television, especially in the Global South, still plays a central role in governments’ desire to reconstruct history and establish cultural hegemony. This is particularly important as Turkey is going through a crisis of hegemony since the public is completely divided in its support for the government. Within the context of this hegemonic crisis, televised popular culture is vital, perhaps more than ever. Specifically, the show reduces a complicated history into easily understandable dichotomies and projects them on to contemporary politics in order to consolidate support for the government. Through televised popular culture, the government mobilizes history for purposes of cultural hegemony and populist politics flavored with nationalist, Islamist, and anti-Western motifs. Ultimately, the TV show presents yet another moment for understanding the mediated nature of 21st-century politics outside Western contexts.

This article explores the attitudes of EVE Online players toward their Russian counterparts. Popular community opinion paints Russian players as aggressive, cliquish and hostile, and as cheats who exploit the game in order to make (real-world) money. The article also analyzes the ways in which Russian pilots challenge, subvert, and discuss these attitudes. Two key arguments are presented. First, that although perceptions of Russian EVE players are often negative, these discourses in EVE are complicated by the fact that aggression, organization, and tight player groups are prerequisites for success within the game. Second, the opinions and agency of Russian players are highlighted. By examining both Russian- and English-language discussions, we see that rather than being silent victims of discrimination, or economic migrants “ruining” the game for other players, Russian pilots inhabit a complex space in a community engaged in two-way dialogue about culture, ethnicity, and play practices in EVE.