Critical journalism in China: Journalists, social activists and new spaces of representation

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At the heart of this project about critical journalism in China are the connections between social activists, journalists and media discourse. These linkages are formative in the development of new spaces of representation within the authoritarian politic al context of China. Media representations of social and environmental problems have a democratizing potential because they give marginalized and poor people a voice in the public sphere. The hegemonic role of the Chinese media is to serve as the mouthp iece of the Communist Party of China. Censorship takes the form of imposed sanctions and the media?s self-regulation. The project will investigate critical journalists? discursive strategies to push the boundaries restricting the media. A central means to this purpose is to represent social problems through individualized narratives of suffering. The contribution of critical journalism to democratization is related to its ability to mediate conflicts of interests and contention. The project will address this issue through analysing the communication strategies of two groups of social activists: people engaged in environmental organizations and AIDS activists. The project will answer the following research questions: How do social activists and journa lists seek to expand the spaces of representation in China? How do critical journalists explain their focus on people´s suffering? How do representations of suffering in the Chinese media construe political responsibility? How do social and environme ntal activists utilize the media in order to have their perspectives voiced in the public sphere? The project has an interdisciplinary theoretical approach. The aim is to develop a perspective that is able to account for the role of social actors in sha ping discourses. It combines poststructural discourse theory, geographical perspectives on the spatiality of power and scholarship on the media.