Diversity

The ‘unity in diversity’ political motto has become a staple of multicultural societies, despite increased restrictions on the fundamental rights of certain groups. As a political principle, diversity is thus often instrumentalized, and its application in practice is fraught with contradictions. Several scholars have engaged with the challenge of embracing diversity in transnational networks, public spheres and social movements, but accounts of how citizens struggle to implement diversity as they express themselves across media platforms remain very scarce. Media studies have acknowledged that new media have enabled a diversification of content, formats, approaches and publics, as different groups of citizens increasingly report on the events they witness and experience. However, there has been little engagement with the ways in which citizens face the challenge of diversity when they use media for bringing about social transformation. This entry will explore how citizen media, understood as the media of expression of emerging publics, are underpinned by a complex articulation of diversity in the linguistic, discursive, social, cultural and technological spheres. Drawing on a range of case studies, it will analyse the interplay between the claim for diversity and the reproduction of uniformity within citizen media at both the macro- and the micro-level of citizens’ interactions. The case studies selected engage with the decision making processes and bodies created by citizens in their attempt to construct truly democratic spaces in the 1960s movement, in the alter-globalization movement of the 1990s, in the Social Forum process at the turn of the century, and in the more locally-rooted uprisings of the current decade (the Arab spring, the Occupy and the Square movements, etc.). Discussion of the case studies will focus on two themes: attempts by unaffiliated citizens to implement the political principle of diversity and the difficulties they face in inscribing it in the spaces they reclaim as alternative to the mainstream; and the diversity of linguistic, discursive and visual performances of citizens within digital and non-digital environments. Diversity will be shown to be inherent to the communication practices deployed across a constellation of media and by heterogeneous groups of actors, using multiple and hybrid languages. At the same time, this multi-layered diversity constructs a unique subject (an urban space, a cyber-space, a community), and in so doing creates the conditions of citizenship.