Transborder Media Spaces offers a new perspective on how media forms like photography, video, radio, television, and the Internet have been appropriated by Mexican indigenous people in the light of transnational migration and ethnopolitical movements. In producing and consuming self-determined media genres, actors in Tamazulapam Mixe and its diaspora community in Los Angeles open up media spaces and seek to forge more equal relations both within Mexico and beyond its borders. It is within these spaces that Ayuujk people carve out their own, at times conflicting, visions of development, modernity, gender, and what it means to be indigenous in the twenty-first century.

Not only is locative media one of the fastest growing areas in digital technology, but questions of location and location-awareness are increasingly central to our contemporary engagements with online and mobile media, and indeed media and culture generally. This volume is a comprehensive account of the various location-based technologies, services, applications, and cultures, as media, with an aim to identify, inventory, explore, and critique their cultural, economic, political, social, and policy dimensions internationally. In particular, the collection is organized around the perception that the growth of locative media gives rise to a number of crucial questions concerning the areas of culture, economy, and policy.

Long before the COVID-19 crisis, Mexican Indigenous peoples were faced with organizing their lives from afar, between villages in the Oaxacan Sierra Norte and the urban districts of Los Angeles, as a result of unauthorized migration and the restrictive border between Mexico and the United States. By launching cutting-edge Internet radio stations and multimedia platforms and engaging as community influencers, Zapotec and Ayuujk peoples paved their own paths to a transnational lifeway during the Trump era. This meant adapting digital technology to their needs, setting up their own infrastructure, and designing new digital formats for re-organizing community life in all its facets—including illness, death and mourning, collective celebrations, sport tournaments, and political meetings—across vast distances. Author Ingrid Kummels shows how mediamakers and users in the Sierra Norte villages and in Los Angeles created a transborder media space and aligned time regimes. By networking from multiple places, they put into practice a communal way of life called Comunalidad and an indigenized American Dream—in real time.

Theorising Media and Conflict brings together anthropologists as well as media and communication scholars to collectively address the elusive and complex relationship between media and conflict. Through epistemological and methodological reflections and the analyses of various case studies from around the globe, this volume provides evidence for the co-constitutiveness of media and conflict and contributes to their consolidation as a distinct area of scholarship. Practitioners, policymakers, students and scholars who wish to understand the lived realities and dynamics of contemporary conflicts will find this book invaluable.

Deriving from innovative new work by six researchers, this book questions what the new media's role is in contemporary Africa. The chapters are diverse - covering different areas of sociality in different countries - but they unite in their methodological and analytical foundation. The focus is on media-related practices, which require engagement with different perspectives and concerns while situating these in a wider analytical context. The contributions to this collection provide fresh ethnographic descriptions of how new media practices can affect socialities in significant but unpredictable ways.

Lynn Stephen’s innovative ethnography follows indigenous Mexicans from two towns in the state of Oaxaca—the Mixtec community of San Agustín Atenango and the Zapotec community of Teotitlán del Valle—who periodically leave their homes in Mexico for extended periods of work in California and Oregon. Demonstrating that the line separating Mexico and the United States is only one among the many borders that these migrants repeatedly cross (including national, regional, cultural, ethnic, and class borders and divisions), Stephen advocates an ethnographic framework focused on transborder, rather than transnational, lives. Yet she does not disregard the state: She assesses the impact migration has had on local systems of government in both Mexico and the United States as well as the abilities of states to police and affect transborder communities. Stephen weaves the personal histories and narratives of indigenous transborder migrants together with explorations of the larger structures that affect their lives. Taking into account U.S. immigration policies and the demands of both commercial agriculture and the service sectors, she chronicles how migrants experience and remember low-wage work in agriculture, landscaping, and childcare and how gender relations in Oaxaca and the United States are reconfigured by migration. She looks at the ways that racial and ethnic hierarchies inherited from the colonial era—hierarchies that debase Mexico’s indigenous groups—are reproduced within heterogeneous Mexican populations in the United States. Stephen provides case studies of four grass-roots organizations in which Mixtec migrants are involved, and she considers specific uses of digital technology by transborder communities. Ultimately Stephen demonstrates that transborder migrants are reshaping notions of territory and politics by developing creative models of governance, education, and economic development as well as ways of maintaining their cultures and languages across geographic distances.

Hidden information, double meanings, double-crossing, and the constant processes of encoding and decoding messages have always been important techniques in negotiating social and political power dynamics. Yet these tools, “cryptopolitics,” are transformed when used within digital media. Focusing on African societies, Cryptopolitics brings together empirically grounded studies of digital media toconsider public culture, sociality, and power in all its forms, illustrating the analytical potential of cryptopolitics to elucidate intimate relationships, political protest, and economic strategies in the digital age.