Media Cultures in Latin America : Key Concepts and New Debates

Media Cultures in Latin America updates and expands contemporary global understandings of the region’s media and cultural research. Drawing on forty years of contributions made by Latin American cultural studies to the global media research, the book connects this history to newly developing work that has yet to be given deep consideration in anglophone scholarship.

The authors emphasise themes that are key to media and cultural scholarship: distinctive from other world regions, these intellectual debates have been central to how media and communication is studied and produced in Latin America. This approach provides students and scholars with a better framework for engaging with Latin American research beyond the specificities of just one place or one kind of cultural product or technology.

The book is an essential read for upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, anthropology, cultural studies, communication studies, and Latin American studies. It will also be of interest to students and scholars learning about human rights, environmental, indigenous and political activism.

Anna Cristina Pertierra is Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University, where she is also a member of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS). An anthropologist by training, her research has focussed on media and consumer cultures, popular culture and urban modernities in Asia and the Americas. Regionally, her work spans Cuba, Mexico and the Philippines. Anna is the author of Media Anthropology in the Digital Age (Polity 2017), Locating Television: Zones of Consumption (with Graeme Turner, Routledge 2013), and Cuba: the struggle for consumption (Caribbean Studies Press, 2011). With John Sinclair, she edited the volume Consumer Culture in Latin America (Palgrave 2012). Currently, she is the chief investigator of a new research project funded by the Australian Research Council, examining emerging consumer cultures among the former urban poor in four countries: Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines and China.

Juan Francisco Salazar is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University, where he is currently Research Director of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS). Juan is an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker best known for his substantive body of work and contribution to studies of indigenous media practices in Chile and Latin America. His work on Indigenous media in Latin America was pioneering for focusing on the poetics of media practice and bringing together Latin American scholarship on film and communication studies with media anthropology in the U.S. In recent years, his academic and creative work have focused on the coupled dynamics of social-environmental change, with a focus on Antarctica where he has developed pioneering ethnographic work since 2011. He is currently developing work on anthropological approaches to futures and socialities in polar and outer-Earth environments. In 2015 he completed the feature length speculative documentary Nightfall on Gaia shot entirely in Antarctica. His latest film is The Bamboo Bridge (2019) a collaboration with geographer Katherine Gibson. He is a co-author of the book Screen Media Arts: introduction to concepts and practices (with Cohen, H & Barkat, I, 2008, Oxford University Press), which was awarded the Australian Educational Publishing Award 2009 for best book (Teaching and Learning Category); and is co-editor (with Sarah Pink, Andrew Irving and Johannes Sjøberg) of Anthropology and futures: researching emerging and uncertain worlds (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2017).