War Stories

Pedelty, Mark

doi:10.4324/9780203933817

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…The origins of a distinct literature on local journalists' role in international news production can be traced back to Mark Pedelty's (1995) anthropological study of reporting on the El Salvadorian war in the early 1990s. Pedelty did not explicitly talk about something called 'fixers', but rather identified a clear hierarchy of journalistic roles in the news production process.…”

Section: Journalism Studies and 'Fixers'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Journalism ‘fixers’, hyper-precarity and the violence of the entrepreneurial self

Ashraf

Phelan

2022

Journalism

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The figure of the so-called journalism ‘fixer’ has received overdue academic attention in recent years. Scholars have highlighted the role played by fixers in international news reporting, a role historically obscured in the mythos of the Western foreign correspondent. Recent research has produced useful insights about the work done by fixers in ‘the shadows’ of the international news economy. However, it has also tended towards a domestication of the role, where the local ‘fixer’ finds their place in a collaborative relationship with those officially consecrated as ‘journalists’ from elsewhere. This article presents a critical theoretical analysis of this functional role, building on the image of the fixer as a kind of ‘entrepreneur’. Rather than interpreting the latter designation as a source of empowerment or agency, we approach it as a euphemism for the hyper-precarious and exploitative underpinnings of fixer-labour. Our argument draws on different theoretical sources, including Foucault-inspired work on the entrepreneurial rationality of the neoliberal self, Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, and Rancière’s concept of politics. The theoretical argument is supported by the first author’s reflections of working as a Pakistani-based ‘fixer’ during the U.S-led war on terror.

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Section: Journalism Studies and 'Fixers'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Journalism ‘fixers’, hyper-precarity and the violence of the entrepreneurial self

Ashraf

Phelan

2022

Journalism

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“…Doing ethnography in wartime is a fraught practice -as contingent, at times, as the casualty counts I analyze here (De Rond, 2017;Pedelty, 1995). As with the quantification of death in the news, my ethnographic process is troubled by uneven access, emotional attachment, and incomplete understanding.…”

Section: Procedures Of Research: Ethnography In Wartimementioning

confidence: 99%

Death’s common sense: Casualty counts in war reportage from Syria and beyond

Blacksin

2022

Media, War & Conflict

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In distilling war to the amount of bodily harms it causes, war becomes measurable, comparable, and intelligible in its journalistic depiction. Yet the self-evidence of casualty counts mystifies both the contingencies of numerical production and the discursive authority that numbers are employed to evoke. Utilizing two years of ethnographic research with the international press corps in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, this article argues that the importance of casualty counts may be less the statistical reality of war such numbers purport to deliver than it is the symbolism these numbers provide. The ongoing conflict in Syria provides a central case study, approached ethnographically through two registers. First, the author examines on-the-ground casualty counting, demonstrating that what cannot be counted of war yet affects those journalists tasked to quantify war. This circumstance throws into doubt the utility of numbers – and the authority of journalism – for distilling war’s reality. Second, he examines how data on total wartime deaths in Syria, collected by monitoring organizations, is acquired and reproduced by journalists. Here journalists must reckon with the translation of statistical uncertainty into symbolic truth. Finally, the author reflects on the particularity of casualty counts as a journalistic convention, and considers how this particularity is hidden behind a journalistic common sense.

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“…12 Mark Pedelty offers a more polemical critique of the gaps between the rhetoric of environmental justice espoused by stadium rock bands such as U2 and events such as Live Earth, on the one hand, and the environmental effects of these concerts in practice, on the other. 13 This literature forms part of a broader environmental turn across different spheres of music scholarship such as ecomusicology, applied ethnomusicology, and popular music studies. 14 My own research on the live music sector has been largely collaborative and organized under the umbrella of the Live Music Exchange, a research and knowledge-exchange hub led by myself, Adam Behr,Martin Cloonan,Simon Frith,and Emma Webster.…”

Section: Infrastructural Imaginaries and Live Music Ecologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Infrastructure and Environmental Consequences of Live Music

Brennan¹

2021

Audible Infrastructures

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This chapter offers a backstage perspective on the physical and organizational structures of touring and concertgoing. In doing so, it addresses the global challenges of climate change and environmental sustainability through the lens of the live music sector, focusing on the UK as a case study. More specifically, the chapter investigates how actors in the live music industry—made up of artists, audiences, and organizers—perceive and address climate change and sustainability, one of the most urgent problems facing the wider global community. The chapter develops the concept of a “live music ecology,” arguing that an ecological approach to live music draws attention to three other factors: (1) the materiality of the infrastructures and buildings in which live music happens; (2) the interdependence between the actors who identify themselves as operating within a music scene versus other nonmusic work spheres who have a significant impact on live music; and finally (3) the sustainability of live music culture, where all the factors above contribute to meet the needs of the present ecology “without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The underlying argument of this chapter is that the infrastructures at play in the production of live music are often directly at odds with the escapist ideology often found in live music performances as cultural events. Indeed, the chapter highlights some of the ideological contradictions embodied by concert spaces that style themselves as utopian and “green.” Ultimately, it argues that we need more efficient and sustainable musical infrastructures, and that a crucial part of achieving that goal involves developing critical infrastructural imaginaries.

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War Stories

Cited by 14 publications

References 0 publications

Journalism ‘fixers’, hyper-precarity and the violence of the entrepreneurial self

Journalism ‘fixers’, hyper-precarity and the violence of the entrepreneurial self

Death’s common sense: Casualty counts in war reportage from Syria and beyond

The Infrastructure and Environmental Consequences of Live Music

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