[Commlist] Call for contributions: “Media and Class in Greece”

Call for contributions: “Media and Class in Greece” – Proposed edited volume

Yiannis Mylonas and Elena Psyllakou (eds)

During the last years, research on issues of social class in the media 
has been growing. Edited volumes and special issues in journals (Deery & 
Press, 2018; O’Neil & Wayne, 2018; Polson, Schofield Clark, & Gajjala, 
2020; Jakobsson, Lindell & Stiernstedt, 2021; Reifova & Hajek, 2021), 
along with numerous monographs and peer reviewed articles were published 
(Kendall, 2011; Skeggs & Wood, 2012; Eriksson, 2015; Yilmaz, 2016; 
Harkins & Lugo-Ocando, 2018; Jacobsson, 2018; Mylonas, 2019), addressing 
different class-related issues/questions in media-related phenomena at a 
time of deepening inequalities worldwide. A rather multilayered 
sociological concept, class is approached differently by various 
scholarly traditions. Jakobsson, Lindell & Stiernstedt (2021: 2) outline 
three major approaches to class, the Marxist, the gradational and the 
culturalist. The Marxian understanding of class division, exploitation, 
and antagonism is crucial in foregrounding political questions 
associated with inequality and social change. Influenced by Weber, other 
scholars emphasize issues related to lifestyles, status and skills, and 
foreground a rather plural and less conflictual understanding of class, 
focusing on the role of individual agency for social mobility. Further, 
some scholars focus on questions of culture, emphasizing on the 
experiences and the meanings ascribed to class. The combination of 
different dimensions from these traditions of class analysis is 
developed by others (Wright, 2015), so as to use the notion of class to 
address the complexity of late modern, and/or late capitalist social 
contexts. Simultaneously, class has been an important category in 
critical studies in media and cultural studies, developed by the British 
cultural scholars from the 1960s onwards (Williams, 2015; Hall et al., 
1978; Skeggs, 2003), and also through the influential work of Bourdieu 
(2010), while it has also been associated with the critical analyses of 
the political economy of the media (Fuchs, 2015).
The proposed volume wishes to bring together studies focusing on the 
Greek realities of class as they appear in and through the Greek media 
realm. This class-media interplay is thought as structural, performative 
and affective. While class positions, values and attitudes may affect 
the interpretation of media messages, the engagement with the media 
content as well the access to the media system, they are themselves 
mediated and reconstructed by the variety of media at our disposal 
(Polson et al., 2020; Tyler, 2010). We are thus interested in exploring 
the different class cultures that unfold in today’s Greece, by examining 
the meanings, the performances, and the social relations that 
underpin/co-articulate the “making” of class through various media 
practices in the specific country. Research in media and culture in 
Greece make a growing field that is offering promising scholarship from 
scholars working in Greece and abroad (e.g., Platzos, 2012; 
Πουλακιδάκος, 2014; Tziovas, 2017; Kompatsiaris, 2017; Stamou, 2018; 
Aitaki, 2019; Siapera, 2019; Doudaki & Boubouka, 2020; Kostopoulos, 
2020; Karatzogianni & Veneti, 2020; Papanikolaou, 2021; Smyrnaios, 
Papaevangelou, Tsimpoukis, 2021; Πλειός, 2021), that bring important 
up-to-date and critical theoretical perspectives that shed light on a 
variety of previously understudied topics that concern the realities of 
contemporary Greece. Little however, has been written on class cultures 
in this country, particularly while studying the Greek media world. This 
contribution therefore aims at developing the particular discussion.  A 
peripheral European state, Greece has nevertheless been at the forefront 
of European policy-making for at least ten years, catching the attention 
of European and global media as well, on issues related to the EU’s 
economic and border policies, among other. Simultaneously, Greece has 
caught the attention of social movements and left-wing political parties 
from Europe and elsewhere, due to its vibrant and mass left-wing 
militancy, as well as due to the injustices and inequalities occurring 
there against the growing impoverished Greek middle and lower classes, 
and the migrants and refugees stranded in the country due to EU 
agreements. On the downside of the matter, the European and global far 
right was also fascinated by the growth of the Greek far right, which 
found fertile ground to advance during the crisis years and beyond.
Like elsewhere, in Greece too, the prospects for the future seem grim to 
the majority of the population. Ten years of crisis and austerity saw 
the growing of the Greek debt - despite (or rather, because of) the 
neoliberal reforms imposed and applied to the country - the augmentation 
of unemployment, the developing of new migration waves, and new Greek 
diasporas. In such a context, the quality of the Greek democracy is 
steadily diminishing. Simultaneously, the growing of social conservatism 
is also noted, with nationalism, racism and apolitical individualism to 
be on the rise in the country. The election of a conservative government 
in July 2019, implementing a neoliberal authoritative agenda, which 
involves a program of privatizations of public property and deregulation 
of labor and socio-political rights alongside an emphasis on 
nationalist, anti-leftist and “law and order” agendas, hardens the 
living prospects of the many in the country. Since 2019 especially, 
besides the Covid-19 pandemic situation and the burdens it posed to the 
lower classes of a country with minimal welfare resources, the Greek 
society met a variety of other crisis situations too. These include the 
eruption of a Greek #metoo movement during the early 2021, after public 
revelations of physical, psychological and sexual abuse of men and women 
working in a variety of fields such as sports, the arts, the academia, 
and the media. During the summer of 2021 many wildfires unleashed an 
unprecedented environmental catastrophe in Greece, further adding to the 
country’s augmenting environmental problems. In the recent years, an 
escalation of police violence is also witnessed in the country, 
involving the brutalization of migrants, youths, and protesters, and 
cumulating to the murdering of a Roma youth in late October 2021. Last 
but not least, Greece is also lately observing the rise of a new wave of 
far-right practices across the country.
The examination of such intersectional complexities through the critical 
lens of the class-media interplay can deepen the understanding of the 
Greek public life, the emerging identities and subjectivities, the 
social hierarchies as well as the counter-hegemonic and subversive 
practices in the turbulent space of the Greek society. Understanding 
class as a category of both material and cultural inquiry that reflects 
fluid power hierarchies and structures, we pay particular attention on 
how class cultures are entangled with other forms of social 
organizations, identities, and narrations of the self (Beswick, 2020; 
Polson et  al., 2020). In doing so, we argue that “class” does not only 
reproduce uneven social relations organically, while legitimizing 
class-orientated policies and aspirations in the broader social realm, 
but may also become a point of reference for radical identity politics 
and collective mobilization in times of crisis. In that sense, a 
class-media orientated study of contemporary Greek politics and cultures 
may shed light to the meanings and the values generated, publicly 
distributed, and also contested on topics of socio-political importance 
such as inequality, injustice, and exclusion; growing social problems 
that concern not only Greece and require a class perspective for their 
critical understanding and addressing.
The proposed volume welcomes contributions on class-related perspectives 
regarding Greek media consumption practices and everyday media use (in 
both “old” and “new” media), media representations of class-related 
topics, as well as political economy analyses connected with questions 
of class politics and ownership of media conglomerates in the Greek 
media realm, and issues related to class dimensions connected with 
algorithmic biases in the Greek cybersphere.
o	Proposed topics include the following (while welcoming additional 
proposals too):
o	Media representations of the contemporary working class, work 
relations, poverty and precarity
o	Media representations of welfare
o	Class and migration; framing refugees and migrant workers in the Greek 
media
o	Class and gender perspectives; the Greek #metoo
o	Framing the middle class
o	Class and neoliberal cultures in Greece; cultures of meritocracy, 
excellence and success
o	Class and media consumption / Class and everyday media use
o	Greek reality TV and class perspectives
o	Shaming and ridiculing in Greek popular cultures
o	Class and Greek subcultures and countercultures
o	Class aspects and Greek cinema
o	Class politics and media ownership in Greece
o	Class politics and practices of censorship o	Class, fake news and 
Greek conspiracy theories
o	Class and the far right/alt-right in Greece
o	Class and Greek anticommunism o	Class and left-wing media politics
o	Class and the Greek diasporas
o	Class, orientalism and self-orientalization in Greece
o	Class, gentrification, and tourist cultures o	Class conditioning, 
media literacy and access to the media system
o	Class affective structures, relationalities and embodiments in media 
narrations and everyday media use

Please send a 150-200 word abstract at (yiannis.mylonas.hse /at/ gmail.com) by 
Friday, 31 December 2021.

Yiannis Mylonas is Associate Professor at the School of Media, at the 
National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
Elena Psyllakou is postdoctoral researcher at the Greek National Center 
of Social Research – EKKE.

Suggested literature:

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