[Commlist] new book: Democracy and Media in Europe: A Discursive-Material Approach

Democracy and Media in Europe: A Discursive-Material Approach
By Nico Carpentier and Jeffrey Wimmer
Copyright 2025
ISBN 9781032779263
140 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
Routledge

The Open Access version of this book has been made available under a 
Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 
4.0 license

Download from:
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003485438/democracy-media-europe-nico-carpentier-jeffrey-wimmer
or
https://bit.ly/DemoMediaEurope

Description

Democracy and Media in Europe: A Discursive-Material Approach is a 
theoretical reflection on the intersection of democracy and media 
through a constructionist lens.
This focus allows us to understand current political struggles over 
democracy, and over media’s democratic roles, with the latter ranging 
from the traditional support for an informed citizenry and the watchdog 
role, to the organization of agonistic debate and generating fair and 
dignified representations of society and its many (sub)groups, to the 
facilitation of maximalist participation in institutionalized politics 
and media. Moreover, the book’s reconciliation of democratic theory and 
media theory brings out a detailed theoretical analysis of the core 
characteristics of the assemblages of democracy and media, their 
conditions of possibility and the threats to both democracy and media’s 
democratic roles.
This short book provides in-depth reflections on the different positions 
that can be taken when it comes to the performance of democracy as it 
intersects with the multitude of media in the 21st century. As such, the 
volume will be of interest to scholars of media and communication and 
related fields in the social sciences.

Authors

Nico Carpentier is Extraordinary Professor at Charles University 
(Prague, Czech Republic) and Visiting Professor at Tallinn University 
(Estonia) and at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (Suzhou, China). He 
was Vice-President of the European Communication Research and Education 
Association (2008–2012) and President of the International Association 
for Media and Communication Research (2020-2024). His theoretical focus 
is on discourse theory, his research is situated in the relationship 
between communication, politics and culture, especially in social 
domains as war and conflict, ideology, participation and democracy. His 
latest monographs are The Discursive-Material Knot (2017) and 
Iconoclastic Controversies (2021). His last exhibition was The Mirror of 
Conflict photography exhibition, in October 2023 at the Energy Museum, 
Istanbul in Türkiye, and in October 2024 at the Hollar Gallery, Prague, 
in the Czech Republic.

Jeffrey Wimmer is Professor of Communication Science with an emphasis on 
media reality at the University of Augsburg, Germany. From 2008 to 2014, 
he was chairing the ‘Communication and Democracy’ section of the 
European Communication Research and Education Association, and from 2009 
to 2015, the ‘Sociology of Media Communication’ section of the German 
Association of Communication Science. His research and teaching focuses 
on the sociology of media communication, public sphere and 
participation, mediatization and media change, digital games and virtual 
worlds. Recent edited book publications include (Mis-)Understanding 
Political Participation (2018, Routledge) and The Forgotten Subject (2023).

Table of Contents

Introduction  Part I: Democracy  1. Core Components of Democracy  2. 
Struggles over Democracy  3. Conditions of Possibility of Democracy  4. 
Threats to Democracy  5. A First Visual Summary  Part II: Media and 
Democracy  6. Core Components of Media  7. The Roles of (European) Media 
in Democracy  8. Struggles over Media’s Democratic Roles  9. Conditions 
of Possibility for Media’s Democratic Roles  10. Threats to Media’s 
Democratic Roles  11. A Second Visual Summary  A brief conclusion 
References  Index

Praise

"Democracy is the ultimate essentially contested concept and at the same 
time a never to be ultimately fulfilled or realised promise. This 
excellent and very necessary book not only makes this apparent in an 
understandable as well as sophisticated manner but also discusses the 
consequences of this for the role of media and communication within the 
competing articulations of democracy.”
- Bart Cammaerts, Professor of Politics and Communication, London School 
of Economics and Political Science, UK

"The topic of media and democracy is currently highly relevant because 
democracy and media are developing apart. With this in mind, the authors 
of this book systematically describe possible and existing problems of 
democracies in connection with the media, and then just as thoroughly 
examine the question of where the media can develop and how they can be 
kept on a democratic course. This is why this book is important for 
theorists, empirical reseachers and practitioners, as well as anyone 
else who works or wants to work in the fields concerned."
- Friedrich Krotz, Professor of Communication and Media Sciences, 
University of Bremen, Germany

"Heterogeneity and turbulence characterize democracy in Europe; the 
convoluted media landscape is in constant evolution. Both domains are 
contingent, shaped by changing contexts, as are the relations between 
them. Analyzing such moving targets can be a bewildering task. This 
important volume by Nico Carpentier and Jeffrey Wimmer equips the reader 
with an elegant analytic framework to grapple with these challenges. 
From a discursive-materialist perspective the authors provide a very 
lucid toolkit, one to make use of, to work with. For many it will become 
a close companion."
- Peter Dahlgren, Professor emeritus, Lund University, Sweden. His 
latest book is Media Engagement (Routledge, 2023, with Annette Hill)

"Nico Carpentier and Jeffrey Wimmer have written a hopeful book that 
offers a map of the often confusing landscape of current democracy and 
media. Everything you want to know about the state of 21st-century 
democracy and media is here. The book’s learned, yet clear and concise, 
voice shows how theory can help us tackle the great challenges of our 
times and build democratic societies that do not succumb to declarations 
of decay and pessimism."
- Anu Kantola, Professor of Media and Communication Studies, University 
of Helsinki

"This book is groundbreaking in many ways. It is the first comprehensive 
investigation in a long time on what is arguably today’s most important 
socio-political issue – in Europe and elsewhere: Without media that 
respects democratic standards there is no modern democracy; without 
democracy there is no politics that respects fundamental human rights. 
Consequently, the book combines approaches from communication and media 
studies and political science. But, moreover, it interlinks the 
material(ist) and the discursive component of media and democracy in a 
way that the struggles over what is expected from both are revealed. 
Highly recommended."
- Josef Seethaler, Research Group Leader “Media, Politics and 
Democracy”, Austrian Academy of Sciences

"This groundbreaking book by Nico Carpentier and Jeffrey Wimmer provides 
a powerful and innovative response to a pressing issue of our time: the 
thorny relationship between democratic politics and the media in Europe. 
In so doing, the book elaborates a distinctive discursive-material 
approach, neatly reconciling themes in discourse theory and new 
materialism, which foregrounds the primacy of politics in our 
understanding of the contemporary forms and articulations of democracy 
and the media. Delineating and representing the complex intersections 
between different democratic and media assemblages, the book sets the 
agenda for future explorations and interventions in this critical field 
of study and practice."
 - David Howarth, Professor in the Department of Government and 
Co-Director of the Centre for Ideology and Discourse Analysis, 
University of Essex, UK


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