Christina Dunbar-Hester, who is currently based at the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Amsterdam, presented her work on media activism. Drawing on ethnographic studies of a US-based radio activist organisation, she engaged with what can be construed as a “problem of scale.”

In her talk, Dunbar-Hester concentrated on a particular tension media activists have encountered in their activities in recent decades: that between their commitment to large-scale policy reform and small-scale grassroots initiatives. As she put it, media activism of the 1990s and 2000s was heavily invested in a major political project – a radical transformation of the media system, or more specifically ‘the fight against media consolidation’. At the same time, however, they were actively committed to media practices situated at the local level, such as community radio.