M Gillespie
Biographic Data
| ID | 14495 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Gillespie |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Gillespie |
| SIGNATURE | GILLESPIE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Open University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2982-1107 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 347 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
A Migrant Archive: Chronicling Religious and Spiritual Experiences during the Pandemic 2020–23
This article focuses on a digital platform which invited forced migrants to document their experiences during the Covid pandemic, resulting in an archive of digital materials, much of it relating to religion and spirituality: around 1000 contributions by around 800 asylum‐seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants. Using smartphones, they shared audio and video recordings, photos, texts, artworks, etc. The Covid Chronicles project, funded by the…
Russia isn’t a country of Putins!’: How RT bridged the credibility gap in Russian public diplomacy during the 2018 Fifa World Cup
In the context of deteriorating relations with ‘Western’ states, Russia’s state-funded international broadcasters are often understood as malign propaganda rather than as agents of soft power. Subsequently, there is a major credibility gap between how Russian state media represents itself to the world and how it is actually perceived by overseas publics. However, based on the study of RT’s coverage of the Russian hosted FIFA 2018 World Cup and th…
Shakespeare Lives on Twitter: Cultural diplomacy in the digital age
This article is based on multilingual research that analyses the British Council Shakespeare Lives programme. Based on a study of the global Twitter campaign to promote the programme, and a manual coding and analysis of 4,722 tweets in five languages, we investigate the key Twitter actors, topics and types of engagement generated by the campaign. We reflect on two topics that still largely remain absent in the field of cultural diplomacy: first, …
Understanding RT’s Audiences: Exposure Not Endorsement for Twitter Followers of Russian State-Sponsored Media
The Russian state-funded international broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today) has attracted much attention as a purveyor of Russian propaganda. To date, most studies of RT have focused on its broadcast, website, and social media content, with little research on its audiences. Through a data-driven application of network science and other computational methods, we address this gap to provide insight into the demographics and interests of RT’s Twit…
The cultural politics of commemoration: Media and remembrance of the Russian revolutions of 1917
The year 2017 marked the centenary of the revolutions of February and October 1917 which led to the collapse of the Russian Empire. These events (and their accompanying mythologies) proved pivotal in creating a uniquely politicised approach to remembrances of revolution across and beyond the post-Soviet space. This special section uses the revolutions’ centenary as an entry point for reassessing the cultural politics of commemoration. In particul…
Differentiated visibilities: RT Arabic’s narration of Russia’s role in the Syrian war
This article focuses on the social media content of RT Arabic – formerly Russia Today – the Russian state-funded international news media organization. It presents results of a qualitative analysis of social media posts in order to assess whether and how RT Arabic constructs a strategic narrative of its involvement in the war in Syria. It also contributes to conceptualizations of how state-sponsored strategic narratives operate in practice and ca…
Tweeting the Russian revolution: RT’s #1917Live and social media re-enactments as public diplomacy
Throughout 2017, the Russian state broadcaster, RT (formerly Russia Today), commemorated the centenary of the 1917 revolution with a social media re-enactment. Centred on Twitter, the 1917LIVE project involved over 90 revolution-era characters tweeting in real time as if the 1917 revolution was happening live on social media. This article is based on an analysis of a sample of tweets by users who engaged with 1917LIVE, alongside focus group discu…
Syrian Refugees and the Digital Passage to Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances
This research examines the role of smartphones in refugees’ journeys. It traces the risks and possibilities afforded by smartphones for facilitating information, communication, and migration flows in the digital passage to Europe. For the Syrian and Iraqi refugee respondents in this France-based qualitative study, smartphones are lifelines, as important as water and food. They afford the planning, navigation, and documentation of journeys, enabli…
What to do about social media? Politics, populism and journalism
European international broadcasting and Islamist terrorism in Africa: The case of Boko Haram on France 24 and Deutsche Welle
This article examines the relationship between European (international) broadcasting and Islamist terrorism in Africa and positions media portrayal of Boko Haram within the larger picture of Europe’s relations with Africa. Two international broadcasters provide the basis for the analysis: France 24 and Deutsche Welle. The article compares and contrasts their discourse on terrorism to advance several arguments: 1) that through their respective por…
Terrorism discourse on French international broadcasting: France 24 and the case of Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris
This article offers an inquiry into the discursive construction of ‘terrorism’ by France 24, the French international broadcaster, in the aftermath of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in January 2015. The article argues that the broadcaster seems to employ a relatively narrow definition of terrorism linking it to Islam and Muslims. France 24 portrays the attacks as an external phenomenon coming to France from outside. The blame is …
Digital Durham
BBC Arabic, Social Media and Citizen Production: An Experiment in Digital Democracy before the Arab Spring
This article examines an innovative experiment in democratizing international broadcasting through embracing a participatory model of production. In spring 2010, a political debate television series was co-created by BBC Arabic and citizen producers, using social media tools. Based around interviews with prominent political and controversial public figures, the programme (G710) was broadcast weekly on satellite TV across the Middle East and the A…
Dissenting Citizenship? Young People and Political Participation in the Media-security Nexus
During the last decade, a media-security nexus has emerged that has exacerbated pervasive feelings of the precariousness of citizenship among British Muslims. Legally, citizenship became reversible while political and media discourses and religious discrimination compounded by racism created deep unease about belonging, identity and the very possibility of multicultural citizenship. With diminishing prospects for effective participation in formal…
African Theatre
Broadcasting in South Asian Languages
Writers at Bush House
Letters to and from Bush House
Listener letters were the main source of information about responses to overseas programmes until formal audience research methods were put in place after World War Two. They arrived in their thous
Transcultural journalism: Translations, transmissions and transformations
Transcultural journalism and the politics of translation: Interrogating the BBC World Service
When George Orwell worked for the BBC Eastern Services during the Second World War, he regarded it as ‘an organ of colonial discourse propagating the word and world view of the metropolitan centre to its peripheral subject people’ (Kerr, 2002: 473–90). Orwell’s misgivings about his own journalistic practice and the BBC Eastern Service’s suspected ideological functions may pose an enduring dilemma for some journalists, but many are delighted to en…
Introduction – South Asian diasporas and the BBC World Service: Contacts, conflicts, and contestations
This article sets out the analytical framework of this special issue and outlines the development of BBC radio broadcasting in South Asia. It analyses the ways in which the BBC in South Asia is integrally and indissolubly intertwined with ‘critical events’ and shifting geopolitical priorities: from the imperial and diasporic imaginings of the Empire Service, to its dissolution and the expansion of South Asian language services during World War II…
The Mumbai attacks and diasporic nationalism: BBC World Service online forums as conflict, contact and comfort zones
The violent attacks on Mumbai in November 2008 occasioned intense political debates in the online forums of the BBC World Service (BBCWS). This article examines the ‘Have Your Say’ forums of BBC Urdu and BBC Hindi. Such public forums can be understood as ‘contact zones’ of debate between digitally empowered, potential ‘world citizens’, located both inside and outside their countries of identification (in this case Pakistan and India). BBCWS envis…
Epilogue The BBC World Service and the Middle East - Past, Present, and Future Dilemmas
The article offers information on the company BBC World Service (BBCWS) and its development and struggle in the Middle East. It also explains the relationship between BBCWS and British Foreign and Commonwealth office (FCO). Public diplomacy is stated to have altered the perceived and potential role of the BBC in the region
Shifting Securities: Theory, Practice and Methodology: A Response to Powers, Croft and Noble
Shifting Securities: News Cultures, Multicultural Society and Legitimacy
Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change
For 'ethnic minorities' in Britain, broadcast TV provides powerful representations of national and 'western' culture. In Southall - which has the largest population of 'South Asians' outside the Indian sub-continent - the VCR furnishes Hindi films, 'sacred soaps' such as the Mahabharata, and family videos of rites of passage, as well as mainstream American films. Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change examines how TV and video are being used t…
Syrian Refugees and the Digital Passage to Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances
This research examines the role of smartphones in refugees’ journeys. It traces the risks and possibilities afforded by smartphones for facilitating information, communication, and migration flows in the digital passage to Europe. For the Syrian and Iraqi refugee respondents in this France-based qualitative study, smartphones are lifelines, as important as water and food. They afford the planning, navigation, and documentation of journeys, enabli…
Dissenting Citizenship? Young People and Political Participation in the Media-security Nexus
During the last decade, a media-security nexus has emerged that has exacerbated pervasive feelings of the precariousness of citizenship among British Muslims. Legally, citizenship became reversible while political and media discourses and religious discrimination compounded by racism created deep unease about belonging, identity and the very possibility of multicultural citizenship. With diminishing prospects for effective participation in formal…
What to do about social media? Politics, populism and journalism
Transcultural journalism and the politics of translation: Interrogating the BBC World Service
When George Orwell worked for the BBC Eastern Services during the Second World War, he regarded it as ‘an organ of colonial discourse propagating the word and world view of the metropolitan centre to its peripheral subject people’ (Kerr, 2002: 473–90). Orwell’s misgivings about his own journalistic practice and the BBC Eastern Service’s suspected ideological functions may pose an enduring dilemma for some journalists, but many are delighted to en…
Security, media and multicultural citizenship: A collaborative ethnography
This special issue reports on a collaborative UK research project which examined how new security challenges are constituted in the intersecting relationships between political and military actors, news producers, news representations and discourses, and news audiences. This article introduces the ethnographic reports which follow, and describes the theoretical premises and methodological strategies of the research. It outlines an innovative, mul…
News media, threats and insecurities: An ethnographic approach
This article presents research from a three-year study of shifting understandings of threat and security in Britain following the 2003 Iraq War. We develop the case for a more integrated and nuanced approach to studying the relationship between policymakers, media practitioners and media publics given the increasing importance of these relationships to international relations (IR) matters of concern. Our analysis demonstrates the ‘push’ and ‘pull…
Differentiated visibilities: RT Arabic’s narration of Russia’s role in the Syrian war
This article focuses on the social media content of RT Arabic – formerly Russia Today – the Russian state-funded international news media organization. It presents results of a qualitative analysis of social media posts in order to assess whether and how RT Arabic constructs a strategic narrative of its involvement in the war in Syria. It also contributes to conceptualizations of how state-sponsored strategic narratives operate in practice and ca…
Ethnic Variation in the Impact of Negative Affect and Emotion Inhibition on the Health of Older Adults
The relations between patterns of emotional experience, emotion inhibition, and physical health have been little studied in older adults or ethnically diverse samples. Testing hypotheses derived from work on younger adults, the authors examined the relations between negative affect and emotion inhibition and that of illness (hypertension, respiratory disease, arthritis, and sleep disorder) in a sample (N = 1,118) of community-dwelling older adult…
Tweeting the Russian revolution: RT’s #1917Live and social media re-enactments as public diplomacy
Throughout 2017, the Russian state broadcaster, RT (formerly Russia Today), commemorated the centenary of the 1917 revolution with a social media re-enactment. Centred on Twitter, the 1917LIVE project involved over 90 revolution-era characters tweeting in real time as if the 1917 revolution was happening live on social media. This article is based on an analysis of a sample of tweets by users who engaged with 1917LIVE, alongside focus group discu…
Transcultural journalism: Translations, transmissions and transformations
Russia isn’t a country of Putins!’: How RT bridged the credibility gap in Russian public diplomacy during the 2018 Fifa World Cup
In the context of deteriorating relations with ‘Western’ states, Russia’s state-funded international broadcasters are often understood as malign propaganda rather than as agents of soft power. Subsequently, there is a major credibility gap between how Russian state media represents itself to the world and how it is actually perceived by overseas publics. However, based on the study of RT’s coverage of the Russian hosted FIFA 2018 World Cup and th…
Understanding RT’s Audiences: Exposure Not Endorsement for Twitter Followers of Russian State-Sponsored Media
The Russian state-funded international broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today) has attracted much attention as a purveyor of Russian propaganda. To date, most studies of RT have focused on its broadcast, website, and social media content, with little research on its audiences. Through a data-driven application of network science and other computational methods, we address this gap to provide insight into the demographics and interests of RT’s Twit…
Shifting Securities: News Cultures, Multicultural Society and Legitimacy
Physical Hardiness and Styles of Socioemotional Functioning in Later Life
Although the aging literature suggests that there are many paths to later life adjustment, there have been few empirical attempts to identify different patterns of adaptation, or their relation to adaptive outcome. As a way to identify patterns of socioemotional functioning in later life associated with physical hardiness, a cluster analysis was applied to 11 measures of socioemotional functioning in a large sample (N = 1,085) of older adults (65…
BBC Arabic, Social Media and Citizen Production: An Experiment in Digital Democracy before the Arab Spring
This article examines an innovative experiment in democratizing international broadcasting through embracing a participatory model of production. In spring 2010, a political debate television series was co-created by BBC Arabic and citizen producers, using social media tools. Based around interviews with prominent political and controversial public figures, the programme (G710) was broadcast weekly on satellite TV across the Middle East and the A…
Media cultures in India and the South Asia Diaspora
The present article introduces some of the central themes explored across the contributions to this special issue on media cultures and politics, and sets them in a broader context. Media production, circulation and consumption in South Asia are increasingly central to national and transnational political and cultural processes--religious re-nationalisation and diasporisation in particular. New forms and flows of media serve to legitimate, as wel…
Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology In North India
Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology In North India. Peter Manuel. Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1993. xix. 302 pp., maps, musical examples, photographs, notes, glossary, bibliography, Index
The cultural politics of commemoration: Media and remembrance of the Russian revolutions of 1917
The year 2017 marked the centenary of the revolutions of February and October 1917 which led to the collapse of the Russian Empire. These events (and their accompanying mythologies) proved pivotal in creating a uniquely politicised approach to remembrances of revolution across and beyond the post-Soviet space. This special section uses the revolutions’ centenary as an entry point for reassessing the cultural politics of commemoration. In particul…
Terrorism discourse on French international broadcasting: France 24 and the case of Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris
This article offers an inquiry into the discursive construction of ‘terrorism’ by France 24, the French international broadcaster, in the aftermath of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in January 2015. The article argues that the broadcaster seems to employ a relatively narrow definition of terrorism linking it to Islam and Muslims. France 24 portrays the attacks as an external phenomenon coming to France from outside. The blame is …
European international broadcasting and Islamist terrorism in Africa: The case of Boko Haram on France 24 and Deutsche Welle
This article examines the relationship between European (international) broadcasting and Islamist terrorism in Africa and positions media portrayal of Boko Haram within the larger picture of Europe’s relations with Africa. Two international broadcasters provide the basis for the analysis: France 24 and Deutsche Welle. The article compares and contrasts their discourse on terrorism to advance several arguments: 1) that through their respective por…
Shifting Securities: Theory, Practice and Methodology: A Response to Powers, Croft and Noble
Security, Media, Legitimacy: Multi-Ethnic Media Publics and the Iraq War 2003
The article examines how multi-ethnic publics negotiate questions of legitimacy. It explains the deep public scepticism surrounding the Iraq war (2003) and subsequent security policy, not just in terms of declining trust in Prime Minister Tony Blair and in the news media, but as a corrosive 'legitimacy deficit' with significant implications for the prospects of participatory democracy and multicultural citizenship. The arguments are grounded in a…
Shakespeare Lives on Twitter: Cultural diplomacy in the digital age
This article is based on multilingual research that analyses the British Council Shakespeare Lives programme. Based on a study of the global Twitter campaign to promote the programme, and a manual coding and analysis of 4,722 tweets in five languages, we investigate the key Twitter actors, topics and types of engagement generated by the campaign. We reflect on two topics that still largely remain absent in the field of cultural diplomacy: first, …
Epilogue The BBC World Service and the Middle East - Past, Present, and Future Dilemmas
The article offers information on the company BBC World Service (BBCWS) and its development and struggle in the Middle East. It also explains the relationship between BBCWS and British Foreign and Commonwealth office (FCO). Public diplomacy is stated to have altered the perceived and potential role of the BBC in the region
Technology and tradition: Audio-visual culture among South Asian families in West London
(1989). Technology and tradition: Audio-visual culture among South Asian families in West London. Cultural Studies: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 226-239
Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology In North India
Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology In North India. Peter Manuel. Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1993. xix. 302 pp., maps, musical examples, photographs, notes, glossary, bibliography, Index
Connected: Engagements with Media
Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change
For 'ethnic minorities' in Britain, broadcast TV provides powerful representations of national and 'western' culture. In Southall - which has the largest population of 'South Asians' outside the Indian sub-continent - the VCR furnishes Hindi films, 'sacred soaps' such as the Mahabharata, and family videos of rites of passage, as well as mainstream American films. Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change examines how TV and video are being used t…
Ethnic Variation in the Impact of Negative Affect and Emotion Inhibition on the Health of Older Adults
The relations between patterns of emotional experience, emotion inhibition, and physical health have been little studied in older adults or ethnically diverse samples. Testing hypotheses derived from work on younger adults, the authors examined the relations between negative affect and emotion inhibition and that of illness (hypertension, respiratory disease, arthritis, and sleep disorder) in a sample (N = 1,118) of community-dwelling older adult…
Media cultures in India and the South Asia Diaspora
The present article introduces some of the central themes explored across the contributions to this special issue on media cultures and politics, and sets them in a broader context. Media production, circulation and consumption in South Asia are increasingly central to national and transnational political and cultural processes--religious re-nationalisation and diasporisation in particular. New forms and flows of media serve to legitimate, as wel…
From Comic Asians to Asian Comics: Goodness Gracious Me, British Television Comedy and Representations of Ethnicity
Physical Hardiness and Styles of Socioemotional Functioning in Later Life
Although the aging literature suggests that there are many paths to later life adjustment, there have been few empirical attempts to identify different patterns of adaptation, or their relation to adaptive outcome. As a way to identify patterns of socioemotional functioning in later life associated with physical hardiness, a cluster analysis was applied to 11 measures of socioemotional functioning in a large sample (N = 1,085) of older adults (65…
Security, Media, Legitimacy: Multi-Ethnic Media Publics and the Iraq War 2003
The article examines how multi-ethnic publics negotiate questions of legitimacy. It explains the deep public scepticism surrounding the Iraq war (2003) and subsequent security policy, not just in terms of declining trust in Prime Minister Tony Blair and in the news media, but as a corrosive 'legitimacy deficit' with significant implications for the prospects of participatory democracy and multicultural citizenship. The arguments are grounded in a…
Security, media and multicultural citizenship: A collaborative ethnography
This special issue reports on a collaborative UK research project which examined how new security challenges are constituted in the intersecting relationships between political and military actors, news producers, news representations and discourses, and news audiences. This article introduces the ethnographic reports which follow, and describes the theoretical premises and methodological strategies of the research. It outlines an innovative, mul…
News media, threats and insecurities: An ethnographic approach
This article presents research from a three-year study of shifting understandings of threat and security in Britain following the 2003 Iraq War. We develop the case for a more integrated and nuanced approach to studying the relationship between policymakers, media practitioners and media publics given the increasing importance of these relationships to international relations (IR) matters of concern. Our analysis demonstrates the ‘push’ and ‘pull…
Anytime, anyplace, anywhere: Digital diasporas and the BBC World Service
Introduction – South Asian diasporas and the BBC World Service: Contacts, conflicts, and contestations
This article sets out the analytical framework of this special issue and outlines the development of BBC radio broadcasting in South Asia. It analyses the ways in which the BBC in South Asia is integrally and indissolubly intertwined with ‘critical events’ and shifting geopolitical priorities: from the imperial and diasporic imaginings of the Empire Service, to its dissolution and the expansion of South Asian language services during World War II…
The Mumbai attacks and diasporic nationalism: BBC World Service online forums as conflict, contact and comfort zones
The violent attacks on Mumbai in November 2008 occasioned intense political debates in the online forums of the BBC World Service (BBCWS). This article examines the ‘Have Your Say’ forums of BBC Urdu and BBC Hindi. Such public forums can be understood as ‘contact zones’ of debate between digitally empowered, potential ‘world citizens’, located both inside and outside their countries of identification (in this case Pakistan and India). BBCWS envis…
Epilogue The BBC World Service and the Middle East - Past, Present, and Future Dilemmas
The article offers information on the company BBC World Service (BBCWS) and its development and struggle in the Middle East. It also explains the relationship between BBCWS and British Foreign and Commonwealth office (FCO). Public diplomacy is stated to have altered the perceived and potential role of the BBC in the region
Shifting Securities: Theory, Practice and Methodology: A Response to Powers, Croft and Noble
Shifting Securities: News Cultures, Multicultural Society and Legitimacy
Mapping Digital Diasporas @ BBC World Service: Users and Uses of the Persian and Arabic Websites
This article presents research on two key BBC World Service websites, BBC Persian Online and BBC Arabic Online. It draws on in-house BBC data, supplemented by our own semi-structured interviews with online editors and other key World Service staff. It examines where users of the two sites are located, their demographic characteristics and their views on and uses of the sites. The data is analyzed in the context of debates about the politics of di…
African Theatre
Broadcasting in South Asian Languages
Writers at Bush House
Letters to and from Bush House
Listener letters were the main source of information about responses to overseas programmes until formal audience research methods were put in place after World War Two. They arrived in their thous
Transcultural journalism: Translations, transmissions and transformations
Transcultural journalism and the politics of translation: Interrogating the BBC World Service
When George Orwell worked for the BBC Eastern Services during the Second World War, he regarded it as ‘an organ of colonial discourse propagating the word and world view of the metropolitan centre to its peripheral subject people’ (Kerr, 2002: 473–90). Orwell’s misgivings about his own journalistic practice and the BBC Eastern Service’s suspected ideological functions may pose an enduring dilemma for some journalists, but many are delighted to en…
Dissenting Citizenship? Young People and Political Participation in the Media-security Nexus
During the last decade, a media-security nexus has emerged that has exacerbated pervasive feelings of the precariousness of citizenship among British Muslims. Legally, citizenship became reversible while political and media discourses and religious discrimination compounded by racism created deep unease about belonging, identity and the very possibility of multicultural citizenship. With diminishing prospects for effective participation in formal…
Sociology (30 works) · Political science (27 works) · Media studies (23 works) · Law (21 works) · Politics (21 works) · Law (20 works) · History (12 works) · Media Studies and Communication (11 works) · History (9 works) · Art (7 works)