Liberal Democracy and the Global Culture Wars: a Media Anthropological Perspective
My current research is a manner of Global South sequel to my recently published book on the online culture wars in the English-speaking world, The Anthropology of Digital Practices: Dispatches from the Online Culture Wars (Postill 2024). I am interested in studying comparatively the digital mediation of ideological conflicts over core societal values, aka culture wars, in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia and other regions in the South, and how these struggles may be changing local ideas and practices about liberal democracy. This is largely desktop research on primary and secondary sources, although I am also conducting expert interviews with regional specialists.
John Postill
Vita
John Postill (PhD, UCL) is an Anglo-Spanish anthropologist currently working at RMIT University, in Melbourne. He specialises in the study of media, communication and socio-political change. To date he has conducted fieldwork in Malaysia, Indonesia, Spain and (online) in the Anglosphere. He is the author of numerous publications, including The Anthropology of Digital Practices: Dispatches from the Online Culture Wars (2024, Routledge) and The Rise of Nerd Politics (2018, Pluto). At present he is researching the online culture wars globally.
Forschungsschwerpunkt
Online Culture Wars
Content Creation
Identity Politics
Global Politics
Polarisation
Southeast Asia, Europe, the Global South
Publikationen (Auswahl)
Postill, J., 2024. The anthropology of digital practices: Dispatches from the online culture wars. Taylor & Francis.
Postill, J., 2018. The rise of nerd politics. Digital activism and political change. London: Pluto Press.
Postill, J., 2018. Populism and social media: a global perspective. Media, culture & society, 40(5), pp.754-765.
Postill, J., 2017. Remote ethnography: Studying culture from afar. In The Routledge companion to digital ethnography (pp. 87-95). Routledge.
Postill, J., 2014. Democracy in an age of viral reality: A media epidemiography of Spain’s indignados movement. Ethnography, 15(1), pp.51-69.
Postill, J., 2008. Localizing the internet beyond communities and networks. New Media & Society, 10(3), pp.413-431.
Postill, J., 2006. Media and nation building: How the Iban became Malaysian. Berghahn Books.
Postill, J. and Pink, S., 2012. Social media ethnography: The digital researcher in a messy web. Media International Australia, 145(1), pp.123-134.
Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J. Lewis, T., Hjorth, 2015. Digital ethnography: Principles and practice.
Bräuchler, B. and Postill, J. eds., 2010. Theorising media and practice (Vol. 4). Berghahn Books.
