Media territories and urban conflict

Abstract

This article deals with the media-related practices enacted by social actors during urban conflict. Its theoretical objective is to stress the need for audience studies to focus on social actors’ concrete practices and, consequently, to switch from essentialist notions of ‘audiences’ to ‘audiencing’ as a practice. This makes it necessary to build theoretical and methodological bridges between audience and urban studies. Focusing on a conflict between Chinese migrants and Italian residents in an area of Milan, the article employs the concept of ‘media territories’ to account for the heterogeneous assemblages of media platforms, contents and devices mobilised by social actors to make sense of the conflict and to impose their own representations of the self, of competitors and of urban space. Within these assemblages, audiencing forms an important ‘secondary’ activity, whose sense can be understood only in relation to the other practices involved. The exploration of these assemblages is necessary for coming to grips with social actors’ conflictual media practices, and to understand the dynamics of urban conflict in media-saturated contexts.