Abstract
Austerity has been one of the keywords in United Kingdom’s political discourse in the past few years. It gained traction in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and it has been at the heart of successive Tory governments’ economic policies. Opposition to austerity among left-wing voters is not a new phenomenon in the United Kingdom, but it gained considerably more publicity in the run-up to and after Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour Party leader in 2015. Bart Cammaerts’ book traces the role of the media in the history and development of the UK’s anti-austerity movement. He argues that the media played a crucial role ‘in the constitution and development of this movement’ (pp. 4–5). Cammaerts writes that mediation practices were central in the setting up of the movement, for internal communication among the activists in terms of mobilising for and coordinating direct action, for communicating the aims and goals of the activists, for self-representing and depicting the actions, and for how the mainstream media represented UK Uncut’s actions and reproduced the activists’ messages. (p. 5)
Cammaerts is strongly of the view that media and communication should not be treated as peripheral to the study of social movements. The aim of his book is to present ‘a conceptual framework that encompasses the various “moments” in which media and communication are implicated in protest and social change’ (p. 6). His framework is based on the Circuit of Culture concept and its five moments: production, representation, identity, reception/consumption, and regulation. Cammaerts structures his book around these five moments. Chapter 2, ‘Situating the Circulation of Protest’, introduces the conceptual framework. Chapter 3, ‘’The Production of Anti-Austerity Discourses and Frames’, focuses on the moment of production. Cammaerts argues that the anti-austerity movement is characterised by two main discourses: ‘(1) a renewed politics of redistribution; and (2) a real democracy’ (p. 39). Chapter 4, ‘The Self-Mediation Practices of Anti-Austerity Movement’, then explores the self-mediation practices of the activists. Chapter 5 presents the media representation of the anti-austerity movement while chapter 6 analyses the reception of the discourses and frames by non-activists. The final chapter brings the whole book together by centring on the so-called ‘mediation opportunity structure’ concept, ‘which is characterized by the dynamic interplay between the agentic opportunities and the structural constraints aiming to thwart these opportunities’ (p. 163). Cammaerts’ book makes an excellent conceptual contribution to the study of the role of the media in the anti-austerity protest movement and more generally in protest movements.