commbox Eastern & Southeast Europe

"Press freedom provides both the oxygen of democracy and the laughing gas of infotainment and commercial exploitation. This has been something of a shocking discovery to make for people in Central and Eastern Europe. When they were trying to imagine, and plan for, a new media order once the Communis ... more

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Freedom and Responsibility. Yearbook 2005

Christian Möller, Ilia Dohel (eds.)

Vienna: OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media (2005), 223 pp.

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Media Sustainability Index 2004: The Development of Sustainable Independent Media in Europe and Eurasia

Washington, DC: IREX (2005), 275 pp.

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Das Internet in Russland: Eine Untersuchung zum spannungsreichen Verhältnis von Politik und Runet

Viktoria Brunmeier

München: Verlag Reinhard Fischer (2005), 182 pp.

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Television Across Europe: Regulation, Policy and Independence. Vol. 2: France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland

Budapest: Open Society Institute (2005), pp. 637-1152

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Television Across Europe: Regulation, Policy and Independence. Vol. 3: Republic of Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, United Kingdom

Budapest: Open Society Institute (2005), pp. 1165-1662

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Media and Democracy: The KAF Democracy Report 2005

Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) (ed.)

Bonn: Bouvier (2005), 323 pp.

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Le droit d'informer: Le rôle des médias dans le développement économique

Banque Mondiale

Bruxelles: De Boeck & Larcier (2005), 406 pp.

"Une presse indépendante est essentielle pour un développement économique équitable : elle contribue à donner la parole aux personnes pauvres et privées de droit. Des médias autonomes participent également à l’édification de bases solides pour une société libre et transparente. Les aut ... more

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Television Across Europe: Regulation, Policy and Independence. Vol.1: Overview, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia
Deep Insights

Budapest: Open Society Institute (2005), 621 pp.

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Nachrichtenmedien als Mediatoren von Peace-Building, Demokratisierung und Versöhnung in Nachkriegsgesellschaften

Projektgruppe Friedensforschung Konstanz (ed.)

Berlin: Regener (2005), 306 pp.

"Während die Untersuchung von Kriegsberichterstattung und Propaganda auf eine lange Tradition in der sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung zurückblicken kann, gibt es bislang erst wenige empirische Untersuchungen, welche die Berichterstattung über Nachkriegs- und Friedensprozesse zum Gegenstand habe ... more

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The Gender and Media Handbook: Promoting Equality, Diversity and Empowerment

Kirini Kafiris (ed.)

Nicosia: Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies (2005), 165 pp.

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Fight the Power: The Role of the Serbian Independent Electronic Media in the Democratization of Serbia

Spasa Bosnjak

Burnaby, BC: Simon Fraser University, School of Communication, Master Thesis (2005), 123 pp.

"This thesis presents the major contributions of the Serbian independent electronic media to the struggle for the democratization of Serbia throughout the 1990s. The thesis also examines some aspects of the transformation of the media in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and outlines several different the ... more

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Media and Glocal Change: Rethinking Communication for Development

Oscar Hemer, Thomas Tufte (eds.)

Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO); Nordicom (2005), 493 pp.

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Mediating Religion and Film in a Post-Secular World

Stephen Hughes, Birgit Meyer (eds.)

Postscripts, volume 1, issue 2-3 (2005), pp. 149-374

"This special issue seeks to explore the common ground shared by practices of filmmaking and religious institutions located within postcolonial settings and increasingly linked in global infrastructures. The articles presented here converge in combining theoretical reflections about the interface of ... film and religion with specific examples or historical and ethnographic cases. Written by authors with backgrounds in film studies, religious studies, and anthropology, the contributions to this multidisciplinary issue are based on two common, more or less explicit, points of departure. One concerns the realization that the actual entanglement of religion and film highlights the limitations of a modernist view proclaiming the retreat of religion from the public sphere as an inevitable consequence of the processes of modernization and secularization. In our perspective, the interface of film and religion can more fruitfully be addressed from a postsecularist perspective, which seeks to overcome the unproductive, teleological, and normative understanding that religion should be confined to the private sphere. As the contributions to this issue show, in contexts as diverse as India, Ghana, Nigeria, Brazil, and postsocialist Poland, the accessibility of modern mass media in conjunction with the politics of neo-liberalism actually facilitate the proliferation of religion in the public sphere. This implies not only that religions may assume a strong public presence, but also that religion and entertainment are increasingly difficult to distinguish from each other. For example, as Maria José de Abreu shows, the Catholic Charismatic priest, pop-singer, and film actor Marcello Rossi embodies this convergence. Not only has film become a prime medium of religious expression, films also often address a religious audience which in turn is seen to authorize audiovisual representations of the transcendent or divine as truthful and authentic. Ravi Vasudevan argues here how Hindu devotional films represented their own religious spectators as a kind of selfauthenticating redefinition of the social with the divine. Whether this authorization actually occurs, as the articles by Birgit Meyer on Ghanaian pentecostally-oriented video-films and by Matthias Krings on Hausa videos in Northern Nigeria show, is a matter of an intense politics and aesthetics of persuasion that may or may not be successful. While in our era of globalizing media the condition of the possibility for religion to assume a public role appears to depend on the successful accommodation of filmic media, the incorporation of such media also threatens to transform religious practice into a form of mass entertainment. The fear of being made subject to superficial visual regimes, as the articles by Mattijs van de Port and Marleen de Witte highlight, may lead religious practitioners to be highly suspicious about the formats and styles that go along with audiovisual mass media. In addition to this postsecular stance, the articles presented in this special issue also share a commitment to moving beyond the assumption of an ontological difference between religion as a domain of the transcendent, on the one hand, and film as a domain of neutral technology, on the other. In this regard, we prefer the notion of mediation as a more open-ended, non-determinist solution for exploring the multiple relationships between religion and film. For example, once religion is understood as a practice of mediation, media appear not as alien to the realm of religion, but as an inalienable element on which any attempt to access and render present the transcendental ultimately depends. By using “mediation” we hope to shift our emphasis away from religion and film as abstract substantialized essences towards a non-dualist emphasis on the relational and contingent practices in which film and religion overlap and engage each other. Brent Plate, in his contribution to this issue, coins the term “religious cinematics” to stress explicitly this point where religion and film merge through the embodied practices of the human senses." (Guest Editors’ Preface, pages 150-151) more

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