Trouble Comes to Me

Introduction

Late modernity is a systemic time without a corresponding political place.

Through acts of cross-town travel—finding our way and losing it, repetition and unconscious urban encounters—we constitute our urban social fabric. While this fabric is not a seamless garment—somewhat frayed and patched over by experiences of mis-recognition, muted expressions, and paranoia—it is produced and performed as weft and weave of everyday human interactions within a dense material and cultural infrastructure (Amin & Thrift, 2007). The category of urban citizenship deployed here acknowledges the role of the material as well as the discursive in producing a space that cuts across national citizenship. I argue that urban citizenship is most at stake for a set of increasingly liminalized figures. While in motion, these figures mark out the limits and choreograph sites of struggles around racialized space within the globalizing city. As Georgiou (2011) has recently argued, research on urban cultures and their mediation has overemphasized placelessness and mobility, at the expense of understanding “the relevance of media not just as a way out of place but also as a way in to it” (p. 345). The stories that I investigate here show how within media spaces, alongside contested public spaces, urban subjects politicize their “emplacement” outside of the center of the city and contest control of everyday movements along racialized boundaries.

This twinned process of exclusion and subsequent control of imaginaries of mobility begins from the settler city’s colonial origins and associated fantasies of power, manifest in an ongoing management of indigenous and “third-world looking peoples” (Hage, 1998, p. 19). Practices that are oriented toward the exclusion and formal control of movements within proscriptions of identity in and through the city have been more recently explained through the notion of “periphractic”—that is, excluded or “fenced off” (Goldberg, 1993; Psimmenos, 2000)—space. The relegation of certain groups or collectives to urban peripheries and global margins underlines the conditional nature of contemporary citizenship and belies its basis in hierarchies of dominance and dramas of spatial absolutism. However, a focus on media also draws attention to the temporal aspects of this urban periphery. These mediated, temporal performances speak to what Henri Lefebvre (2004) called the arrhythmia of everyday life, most apparent in contemporary global cities as the smooth acceleration of capital flows at the very same time as attempts to “pin down” in place suburban and periphractic subjects. The politics of citizenship that this produces is felt at the micro-level as a troubling, an unsettling, or a defamiliarization of the everyday that surfaces in media narratives about urban space.

This article is organized in three sections: In the first section, I define the salience of the relationship between media and a pluralized urban public sphere by canvassing recent debates around citizenship; in the second, I outline how shifts in media from a centralized broadcast to a distributed network model have reshaped spaces for urban citizenship; and finally, in the third section, I explore the everyday imaginaries of urban citizenship in two short films produced by community media projects in Western Sydney.

From Metropolitics to Cosmopolitics: The Time and Place of Urban Citizenship

My analysis suggests that community media practices can expand spaces of citizenship against the rhythms of exclusion. Retracing urban space at the local scale allows for reworking of the historical struggles over the nationalist and universal category of “citizen” in an Australian context, where it carries what Judith Brett has called a “partisan” history relating to its definition by conservatives around the time of Federation (Brett, 2001, p. 436). Brett describes how a middle-class appropriation of citizenship as a set of moral obligations and “duties” directed toward the common good positioned “citizens” as possessing individual moral qualities rather than shared experiences. Throughout the 20th century, this normalization of the individual citizen in the name of the nation was held in opposition to the category of the “worker” who would claim rights not particular to the nation. Workers were in fact troublesome to it because their identities were based on wider, globalizing relationships to the division of labor and ensuing negotiations of rights. Brett makes a case that it was the address beyond the nationalist category that was taken up within the formation of the Australian Labor party in the late 19th and early 20th century. From the moment of Australian nationhood, continuing into differential citizenship rights accorded on the basis of source of income in the neoliberal discourse of ramped-up obligations and duties for undeserving welfare recipients, the history of citizenship in Australia has been marked by contestations over not only the sites and scales but also appropriate acts of citizenship (Brodie, 2000; Isin, 2008).

Although a proliferation of different dimensions of citizenship have been added as postmodern architectural flourishes atop Marshall’s (2009) model of the class-determined social edifice as a “skyscraper,” urban citizenship has the potential to work against the scalar model he set up in his three-tiered progressive model of citizenship—as well as the “partisan” history outlined by Brett. The inequalities of modernity he saw as exacerbated from the first storey, civil rights, to the middle level, political rights, were to be redressed in social rights as the final, upper level delivered in the realization of the welfare state. Thus, Marshall believed that the skyscraper would be flattened into a “bungalow” (Marshall, 2009, p. 154). The provocation of urban citizenship similarly reworks the spaces of citizenship, although in dimensions not yet imagined by Marshall. Isin, writing about the struggles of excluded subjects in the global city, provides an injunction to rethink the poetics and politics of citizenship. Isin points to a key theoretical shift, to rethink citizenship as practice rather than category: “not as a bundle of rights, but as struggles to expand the [mediated] public sphere” (Isin, 2000, p. 16). Working from this understanding, it is possible to see media forms as bringing actors, objects, and sociality in dialogue with the urban and transcending the legacy of the models of citizenship outlined above. The mediation of urban belonging produces unsettled and fragmentary rather than fixed and stabilized practices of citizenship. The dismantling of social rights in the neoliberal project gives urban citizenship a particular hollowed-out quality that cannot be easily contained in the political and juridical dimensions of citizenship via passports, voting rights, and genealogies of blood ties (Brodie, 2000).

Citizenship as a social category is often in tension with its legal definition; hence, its emergence as claim in spaces that are based on social realities of ethnicity, gender, and class, as much in highly abstracted trajectories of mobility. Like earlier moves toward “cultural” citizenship, urban citizenship is a “borderlands paradigm” that tracks collectivities

beyond old immigrant-based paradigms of assimilation and social integration [and] calls for a consideration of ethno-cultural values and practices, racialised histories and experiences, and complex gender roles . . . [that frame] marginality as a site of resistance and empowerment. (Benmayor, 2002, p. 99)

Following Benmayor and Tchen, Dolores Hayden has used this notion of an extraterritorial citizenship to figure a broadly inclusive U.S.-based social history, which would include not only national place-making and people-making but also offer something more, in her introduction to The Power of Place:

Public culture needs to acknowledge and respect diversity while reaching beyond multiple and sometimes conflicting national, ethnic, gender, race and class identities to encompass larger common themes, such as the migration experience, the breakdown and formulation of families, or the search for a new sense of identity in an urban setting. They are asking for an extremely subtle evocation of American diversity, which at the same time reinforces our sense of common membership in an American, urban society. (Hayden, 1995, pp. 8-9)

The city as a unit of analysis works here to undercut and rethread binaries of global-local, network-region, cultural-material. Describing the city as a difference machine (again, Isin, 2002) gets at the productivity, complexity and multidimensionality of the urban situation of citizenship. Via this metaphor, Isin (2002) provocatively suggests that we should pay attention to the relations generated by “claims to the city” as it is

the dialogical encounter of groups formed and generated immanently in the process of taking up positions, orienting themselves for and against each other, inventing and assembling strategies and technologies, mobilizing various forms of capital, and making claims to that space that is objectified as the “the city.” (p. 49)

When narrowing the terms of citizenship from the national to the urban, we run the risk of reinforcing new inequalities in city-region relationships, which actively disrupt national governance and regulation and privilege the highly flexible strategies of location practiced by corporations when they seek the optimum arrangements for profitability and access to skilled workers and infrastructures of mobility. As Isin has argued in his 2000 essay “Democracy, Citizenship and the City,” the global urban provides not only a metaphor but also a means of apprehending new economic, political, and social practices. While the most common view of global-city regions, pace Castells (2000), is as nodes in increasingly intensifying “networks of various flows of intensity, extensity and velocity” (Isin, 2000, pp. 2-3.), this view should be seen as distinct from projects that specifically mobilize a concept of urban citizenship that articulates the material and cultural in a critical framework. Rather than looking at the urban simply as an anchor for global networks of capital and labor, the city becomes a medium of friction, of traction between groups and actors brought together in the urban network, but neither free floating nor loosed of bonds. The interstices of the network are where urban citizenship takes place. Urban citizens should not be understood as determined either by material situations or freely chosen “identities.” They are constituted within networks that are not of their making, yet they have the means to dispute and reshape them. An understanding of globalization based on friction rather than ongoing displacements and mutable flows reveals very different forms of agency and patterns of change (Tsing, 2005).

Speaking to the “mobile idea of freedom” (Connolly, 2002), urban citizenship as a concept moves beyond global city fantasies to figure the bases of differences that structure everyday formations of contested public space. Representations of networked mobility far too easily negate what happens in the interstices, in the everyday, in the unremarkable zones of travel and mobility, in the practicalities of “getting around.” A fetishization of urban mobility marginalizes the site of the citizen-as-local by placing it outside the cosmopolitan circulations of the citizen-as-tourist fantastic. The resulting abjection of not-quite-mobile-enough subjects through spatial regimes of racialization and criminalization has recently been discussed in the context of cosmopolitanism and the crucial intersections of age and class (see Sharkey & Shields, 2008). In this situation, urban regions sorely need strategies that are more practical than cosmopolitan transcendence. By positing improvised solutions to the sheer everyday challenges of getting around the city, and confronting powerful forces that align with hierarchies of flows, I instead suggest here that the conversations and attachments generated in cultural friction are examples of subjects collectively “grounding” their citizenship along multiple lines and diverse connections rather than either drawing boundaries between places or seeking to erase differences entirely. Urban citizenship—an intensified if not entirely tautological construction—is a form of practiced locality and struggle for representation in opposition to the image of the “global city.” The common denominator of the practices of urban citizens, in all their speeds and slownesses, is therefore diversifying experience against totalizing processes of globalization. Between political time and community lies the domain of everyday practices of the urban citizen. The practices of media-making surveyed in this essay show that it is possible to question the universality of the category of citizen as an individual, propertied, apolitical actor while making claims for space. The mediation of the city remaps the sites of citizenship, allowing urban subjects to re-imagine fields of action for a contemporary, transnational polity. The examples that I explore here help situate media practices more clearly in relation to the disjunctures produced by urban consumption and transnational migration. The images and stories outlined in the next section embody performances of urban citizenship and as such speak to questions of community within the everyday textures of the city.

The Place of Media: Information and Cultural Exchange

The new geography of a mediated urban citizenship is different in scale and power dynamics from senses of territoriality bound up with traditional media forms. Along these lines, William Uricchio (2004) has recently argued that

notions of “electronic” democracy, citizenship, and governance need to shift from the rather thin models of on-line voting or license applications, to making fuller use of the ideas taken from the more robust participatory communities that we can see in the cultural sector. (p. 159)

For the purposes of this analysis, I consider the ways in which new media networks create options for social relations that diverge from both a national, public service broadcast model that creates concentric circles of mediated locality (e.g., in distinctions between “domestic” and “foreign” content drawn across local-national-international boundaries that underpins an accompanying discourse of cultural consensus and “the national conversation”) and an “access” model—on which community sector media has based in Australia since the 1970s, which embodies an assumption that there is a boundaried and solidaristic “community” that can be spoken for within which certain groups exist with shared identities and interests who are “underrepresented” (rather than actively misrecognized) in an official, regularized public sphere. Both of these previous formations of broadcaster and audience rest on a social relationship of the nation as overarching agent that brings communities and individuals into a single social space. This contiguity is achieved either directly by funding for a public service broadcaster or indirectly by regulation and license allocation, and the result is clearly graded in terms of flows of communicative power away from the broadcast institution.

The community arts and media projects I discuss here have been produced through the auspices of an arts and new media organization operating in the Holroyd-Parramatta area in Western Sydney since the early 1980s: Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE). ¹ ICE as an organization defines its aims as to provide the region’s “diverse communities [with] access to technologies and infrastructure to support and facilitate arts and cultural development, self-expression, and [other artistic opportunities]” (ICE, NMA Scoping Study, 2006, p. 1). ICE also manages SWITCH, a Multimedia and Digital Arts Access Centre, in partnership with the local city council. ICE, in contrast to the broadcast media model outlined above, relies on participatory and decentralized production and distribution model, while based in western Sydney.

Lena Nahlous, a former director of ICE, has characterized the organization’s work as connecting “critical voices . . . to a network and to representations of a broader community” (Nahlous, Cameron, & Ho, 2007). Part of an activist orientation shared by other western-Sydney–based regional community arts organizations, for example, such as Urban Theatre Projects located in Bankstown, ICE has been engaged for some time with “the complex ways in which young people from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, across the vast breadth of the western suburbs [have been] turning to mediatised resources of transnational cultural flows, rather than monocultural traditions” (Maxwell, n.d., “Community and place,” para. 15). The principles of community arts—participation, accountability, self-reflexivity, and engagement—are commensurate with practices in new media arts that use informal networks to reshape existing structures of power. Cultural production at this level takes place at the “interstices of the trained and untrained, of ‘high’ and popular cultures, of community as origin and aspiration, of places real and imaginary, in all their dystopian confusion and churlishness” (Maxwell, n.d., “The politics of representation,” para. 21). Localized media and arts practices therefore can be posited as a means of contesting the relation between social and the spatial, between devalued social subjects and “othered” geographic regions of the global city. While everyday media consumption is still framed by traditional broadcast models, the possibilities inherent in the expansion of mediated spaces of citizenship suggest that increasingly media practices have the potential to reshape scales of personhood and community. May Joseph (1999) has used a performative framework to get at the ways in which “the lifeworld of citizenship entails a network of performed affiliations—private and public, formal and informal—through which the neurons of the state are activated with ideas of a polity” (p. 4). Joseph’s work on what she terms the “nomadic and conditional citizenship related to histories of migrancy and the tenuous status of immigrants” (p. 2) raises the question of the boundaries of citizenship, that is, how its boundary objects and boundary practices may be apprehended through an analysis of the spatial dimensions of media. The expressions of urban citizenship generated by productive encounters between new media and community arts may offer a useful and productive approach to clarifying the ongoing reshaping of relationships between local subjects, urban spaces, and entities beyond the nation.

The institutions of broadcast media therefore can be seen as embodying a kind of upper and lower level of social space, in which the broadcaster and audience are in a locked into parallel but separate spaces through relations that are technosocially determined (in short, some citizens are naturalized through such performances, and others are further problematized). The “new media” geography of urban citizenship, of which ICE is an exemplar, is one that challenges or circumvents the inevitable trumping of national identification over local networks in the broadcast model proposed above. Because these new media agents use delocalized and regionally based Internet service providers to distribute content, or circulate informally through the outreach of physical exchanges of tape, DVD, and community screenings, they reach a much smaller available audience but with the possibility of reconstituting local space in a far more nuanced formation. These mediated performances problematize the currency of terms such as dislocation, cosmopolitanism, and the “borderless world.” Within the practices of citizenship explored here, locality is being reworked and reinscribed rather than displaced into global and transnational cultural networks. The work of ICE explicitly makes interventions in transnational flows of media through its curatorial role. Rather than reproducing the usual metropolis-nation relationship, its media practices are centripetal and seem to follow regional-transnational flows, articulating and redistributing critical resources by skipping over the centralized national and state capital hubs and thereby challenging formal regimes of citizenship (Warner, 2005).

Community media practices are closer to “informal” practices of citizenship based on reciprocal exchanges of experience and emotion, in contradistinction to a formalized and regularized citizenship framework that checks and legitimates identity. Attention to such potentials are important in order to understand the limitations of both a cultural politics of individual expression and a too-narrow focus on citizenship as a normative category resulting from a social contract contained in the nation and help us imagine better alternatives. ICE’s aims to work across communities are evidenced by the ways in which it exploits horizontal and networked conversations about place and identity that cut across the grain of center/periphery discourse. Working across identifications in this way decouples “western Sydney” from any singular group identity and “ownership.” In this aspect, the ongoing work of organizations such as ICE is crucial for the ways in which they decline “the pursuit of a unitary sense of place” in favor of “exploit[ing] the potential for overlap and cross-fertilisation within spaces that in reality support multiple publics” (Amin, 2002, p. 972). ICE’s activist stance is tethered in a hybrid of traditional and new media. Although some of its content is globally accessible via online media distribution, it does not seek to transcend its location and its focus on communities in western Sydney. Its projects’ local reception shows how reterritorialization and new cultural formations of media and culture can take place on a relational level in digital new media. The distributed and virtual relationships within which such nonbroadcast modes work combine networked and mediated forms of sociality with a particular kind of locality based around cultural production—one that invites you to travel but cannot guarantee your survival.

The most resonant example of this “fencing off” of urban space is in the ongoing perception of “bodies out of space” in fears around kids from Sydney’s western suburbs “going to Cronulla”—a shorthand for racist moral panic surrounding rampaging Lebanese boys out of control on the beaches of the White enclaves of southern Sydney during 2005 (and effectively writing out of the equation the deliberate and premeditated violence of young White men; Farred, 2007). Along these lines, in 2006, Today Tonight, a national current affairs program broadcast on a commercial network, portrayed a police operation by 60 officers to target “unsafely modified” cars, as a “hoon crackdown”. The connection between mobility and racial threat was underlined not only by the selection of several young Lebanese men in modified cars who had been apprehended to highlight the work of the traffic police, but also by shots of specialist police and their vehicles and a voiceover that explained that the traffic police were working in tandem with the newly-established Middle Eastern Organized Crime Squad (Today Tonight, 2006). ² In the interviews conducted by the program’s reporter Sophie Hull, the young men whose cars are stopped for inspection along George Street in Sydney’s CBD clearly articulate a sense of discrimination by the police and point to the racial profiling and marginalization of practices of cruising and car culture. An unnamed young man driving a customized car who has been picked up for “oversize tyres” and other defects expresses his dismay at being picked up when others have not, naming his very being-in-the-city center as a subject out of place:

The link between gang violence, modified car culture, and public safety is tenuous to say the least but was reinforced by both the television reports and police “branding” of cars used in the regulation of urban space across the city’s roads with the letters “MEO” (standing for “Middle Eastern Organized” Crime). The next section of this essay explores these new urban realities centered on the exclusion of subjects from the mobile practices of “cruising” the city. The broadcast media narratives are retold as the contestation of periphractic space in two ICE-produced films, Trouble Comes to Me and Happy Lap Habibs. The specific media practices of community cultural production are integral to making claims to the city. By actively taking issue with this relegation of certain, racially marked subjects to the periphery of the city in the name of racialized safe space these stories highlight spatial abjection at the heart of contemporary politics. Yet the acts of citizenship that they document illuminate the frictional intervals of the streets and spaces of western Sydney.

Abject Lessons: The Differentials of Urban Citizenship

These critical practices are embodied in two short films produced by ICE community cultural development projects. Trouble Comes to Me is a 7-minute film that explicitly speaks to the racialization and criminalization of young men in public space in the early 2000s. It was devised by mostly Arabic-speaking young people from western Sydney during a media production project, “Shifa: Agents of Change,” held by ICE in early 2003. The project, which included a camp for participants during which they devised the film, aimed to “provoke ideas on self and cultural identity; inspire participants with possibilities to impact the community and to provide a place for the young people to be heard” (“Trouble Comes to Me” media release, 2003, in ICE, 2000-2010). Happy Lap Habibs, another short film also made as part of the “Agents of Change” project, is more explicitly in the genre of the instructional film, aimed at disciplining the unruly urban citizen (“Road Safety Film Hits the Streets,” media release, 2003, in ICE, 2000-2010). The film was made in partnership with the Motor Accidents Authority and features a set of sketches about car culture and possible misconduct, framed by a fictional “Eye C U TV” news bulletin read by Ahmad Sabra (Figure 1). Escaping and exceeding the local, yet relying on local practices to “work,” the flows of citizenship in these texts are structured by highly differentiated and unevenly accessed practices of mobility: who is allowed to move where and when, who gets asked “where do you come from?”, what kinds of bodies and identities are allowed to circulate.

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Figure 1.

Ahmad Sabra in Abboud and McGrath (2003). Still from Happy Lap Habibs.

Trouble Comes to Me tells the story of a group of young boys who are stopped by police as they travel through the streets and figures the space of the city from inside the car (Figures 2 and 3). The film starts with a police radio report that “a rape [has been committed] on 5th Avenue, [and] the offenders are believed to be of ‘middle-eastern origin’” being mixed with images of a car being driven by a young man through suburban streets. The soundtrack fades and the film focuses on a conversation of a group of boys in the back seat. One boy tells the group an anecdote about his experience of going to the bank for his mother, who when walking behind a “hot” girl “slow[s] right down to give her a bit of space”; however, she ends up running away from him in panic. Their speculation as to why it has happened is strikingly similar to the current affairs program discussion between the television reporter and her interviewee discussed above: “It’s because we’re lebs . . . everyone thinks we’re rapists.” Their car journey is interrupted by police (Figure 4) who ask to see the driver’s license and then take him out of the car and humiliate him in front of his mates. After the police make their identity checks (Figure 5) and the boys continue on their way (Figure 6), the music accompanying the film, a remix of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” recorded as “In the Jungle” by Armed MC, repeats a line over the top of the chorus “Wimoweh,” “don’t want to run anymore.” The film documents a politics of place and the racialization of certain types of movement. The images elucidate the overexposure of certain subjects as they make their way through the city.

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Figure 2.

El-Harris, Abood, & Armed MC (2003). Still from Trouble Comes To Me. Parramatta.

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Figure 3.

El-Harris et al. (2003). Still from Trouble Comes To Me. Parramatta.

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Figure 4.

El-Harris et al. (2003). Still from Trouble Comes To Me. Parramatta.

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Figure 5.

El-Harris et al. (2003). Still from Trouble Comes To Me. Parramatta.

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Figure 6.

El-Harris et al. (2003). Still from Trouble Comes To Me. Parramatta.

Happy Lap Habibs also explores the city through the windows of a car (Figure 7), loosely following the story of a young boy who is trying to get his driver’s license. As a key document claiming urban citizenship in a situation of automobility, the driver’s license figures large in young people’s admission to the city and acts as a sort of urban passport to claim a set of rights to access public space and navigate large distances within the urban network. The requirements of the mobile urban citizen are dramatized in a series of scenes of everyday negotiations of traffic. The subtitles on frames of the film document critical moments to be successfully navigated while driving by providing a catalog of abject lessons (burnouts [Figure 8], getting distracted [Figure 9], not looking out at pedestrian crossings [Figure 10], making illegal turns, road rage [Figure 11], and so on). While the practices of safe driving are emphasized, as would be commensurate with the film’s sponsorship by the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority, the linking segments in the genre of a broadcast news bulletin highlight media space as a site of surveillance and control that circumscribes the potential for media as a space of resistance or self-expression.

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Figure 7.

Abboud & McGrath (2003). Still from Happy Lap Habibs.

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Figure 8.

Abboud & McGrath (2003). Still from Happy Lap Habibs.

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Figure 9.

Abboud & McGrath (2003). Still from Happy Lap Habibs.

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Figure 10.

Abboud & McGrath (2003). Still from Happy Lap Habibs.

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Figure 11.

Abboud & McGrath (2003). Still from Happy Lap Habibs.

These two short narratives document the out-of-step rhythms and interrupted flows of everyday urban motility. They retell the city against an imaginary of highly regulated spaces, transgressing boundaries as well as flows and trajectories. They offer ways of understanding the relationship between the city and social space within an environment that is generated by increasingly accessible media technologies and their integration in everyday life. Playing an important role as media, as modes of exchange and coming between communities and territories often kept separate, such performances of urban citizenship offer cultural sites at which junctures between self, community, and urban polity are rehearsed: specifically those that offer alternative imaginaries and make different connections between scales of agency. These performances are often missing or excluded in the global city analysis, which is allied to the citizen-subject of the nation-state. For example, while Sydney itself imagines itself as a node in global networks, the geopolitics of Western military actions in its imaginary peripheries refracts and is reproduced in the everyday travels of the urban citizen, leading to a keenly felt troubling of social space and resulting abjection of imagined incivilities (Abood, 2000, 2007).

Although hardly “media on a global scale,” these performances of micro-level and tactical forms citizenship link to acutely-felt local struggles, which in turn produce stories and narratives (I’m here, you went there, here we are, why can’t I go there?). These stories offer better understandings of how social space is lived between and outside global-local flows. These short films literally rewrite Sydney traffic, as they provide acts of citizenship that decouple the association of young men (and cars) of “middle Eastern appearance” from threat, danger, and the invasion of territory. At the same time, however, they ultimately pose the question of urban citizenship within a limited framework, one that is at a very local level. Other stories could emerge from other places. While it remains crucial to keep hold of the specificity of individual and disparate activities, geographies and temporalities, the simultaneously local and transnational, material and representational orientation of ICE demonstrates the potential of media activism as a formation of urban citizenship. ICE as an organization with a specific local orientation outside mainstream media frameworks helps work toward defusing “neurotic citizenship” (Isin, 2004), beginning to name and transfigure the multiple forms of “border panic” that take place in and through the urban domain.

Conclusion

The processes of mediation mapped out here build on William Connolly’s arguments about the place of the global and the time of national sovereignty in late modernity. He portrays the acceleration of interaction as producing a time of incoherence and unreality of both political and spatial dimensions when seen through the lens of the nation state. Connolly defines late modern time as arching back to the polis. This attachment to place is unrealizable in the fraught situation of current democratic negotiations, in which elements of the time-space of the modern have both stretched and shrunk way beyond the territorial state. Connolly suggests that in this situation our collective temporalities are increasingly co-present and globalized, whereas our spatialities are increasingly individualized, neurotic, and phobic. In his recently revised edition of Identity/Difference, originally published in 1991, Connolly presages the intensification of the political into two interrelated yet divergent spaces: one increasingly disciplinary in its focus on territoriality and the other an overreaching and unaccountable supranationalism: “Either way, the asymmetry between the late-modern time as an indispensable object of political reflection and the sovereign state as the exclusive site of democracy places the established terms of democratic accountability under tremendous stress” (Connolly, 2002, p. 217). This gap between global time and nationalized space has been productive of desires for “a new vocabulary of citizenship” (Isin, 2009, p. 368). Whether cultural (Stevenson, 2007), postnational, multicultural, or radical, citizenship, much like the globalizing city itself, has been extensively renovated and adapted to cover more ground, thereby extending legal rights born in the nation-state. If cities are carrying far greater democratic and economic pressures than they ever have before, this can be seen to be paralleled by the ways in which the notion of citizenship has extended beyond civil, political, and social matters of belonging, commonality, and care as carried in the welfare state (Marshall, 2009, p. 149) into mediated practices.

Because community media makers as practitioners of urban citizenship rearticulate and redistribute stories that have been marginalized or misrepresented in mainstream media, and even ignore and transcend the agendas of what should be mediated, they rewrite urban space within a unfamiliar set of relations. As such they are able to figure identification across domains that are normally kept separate and thus remediate late modern community. Although the media landscape has significantly expanded from broadcast licenses given to corporations, as well as entities such as universities, community associations, and not-for-profit agencies, more work remains to be done to understand how any move away from the broadcast model may provide a complicated field in which communities can intervene in information flows. While such an expanded field of mediation allows abjected subjects to speak to critiques of dominant practices that endure despite this increasingly diverse technological landscape, the fencing-off of urban spaces also matters more than media can say.