Negotiated uses, contested meanings, changing identities: Greek Cypriot media consumption and ethnic identity formations in North London

Georgiou, Myria (2001) Negotiated uses, contested meanings, changing identities: Greek Cypriot media consumption and ethnic identity formations in North London. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

A large number of Greek Cypriots live in North London, where the sense of belonging in an ethnic community is daily and actively renewed through multiple mechanisms of participation and multileveled communication. A variety of ethnic media, which people consume in everyday life, have their role in the processes of (re)invention and (re)construction of British Greek Cypriot ethnic identities that depend, at the same time, on immediate and mediated experiences in and of the country of origin, the locality and the diaspora. These three spaces - the country of origin, the locality and the diaspora - come together in a meeting point of the virtual and the real, through electronic media. The ethnic electronic media, which are both local and global and which use new and old technologies, challenge the boundaries between geographical positionings and singular categorisations. These media are the focus of this research. In this thesis, I argue that the ethnic electronic media have a vital role for the construction of a new hybrid imagined community, which is neither geographically bounded nor lacks the face-to-face communication, as suggested by Anderson (1983); rather it depends simultaneously on immediate and mediated communication. Traditional institutions and face-to-face relations developed in community centres and alternative ethnic spaces become the immediate context of ethnicity - at the same time, ethnic media become the mediators of ethnicity which is not just local, but also diasporic and global. The survival and the (re)construction of ethnic identities depend as much on traditional community mechanisms and relations, as they depend on the mediated communication of the imagined community. In their contradictions and shifting, ethnic identities continue to be meaningful to people. They depend on a sense of belonging to a community and on sharing common values and everyday culture - both communicated through physical co-existence and the sharing of the media.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Mass Communications
Sets:	Collections > ProQuest Etheses Departments > Sociology
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/2250

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