Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The concept of alternative/activist media encompasses a variety of practices and technologies that operate outside dominant media frameworks. These forms of media aim to bypass traditional gatekeeping mechanisms of powerful media industries to circulate independent content and counter-information, often with an emphasis on horizontal structure, grassroots origins, and participatory production. Alternative/activist media provide a platform for underrepresented voices, fostering cultural production and identity negotiation outside hegemonic structures. In 2017, Clemencia Rodríguez proposed the phrase “media at the margins” to divert the analytical focus from normative definitions to studying the particularities of media configurations, emphasizing the heterogeneous and context-dependent nature of their practices. This shift underscores the need to understand the socio-technical environments, power dynamics, and practices that shape alternative/activist media as well as the forms of agency, ontologies, and epistemologies that underpin them. Since the development of so-called Web 2.0, the boundaries between corporate and alternative media have become increasingly blurred, particularly on social media platforms. Whether alternative/activist media projects position themselves at the margins or center of the media assemblage they are part of, an analytical move away from definitional criteria toward composition is crucial to understand the dynamic processes that make media a site of resistance. The extent to which media can be considered alternative/activist often depends on the broader composition of its formation, including its socio-political positioning, political economy, operational ethos, and technical configuration. The configuration may also hinge on the specific audiences it seeks to engage and the degree to which it challenges dominant media narratives and power structures. Accordingly, emerging approaches that attend to processes of mediation and mediatization, especially of digital alternative media, highlight the importance of local media ecologies and the interconnectedness of media practices across time and space, contributing to a nuanced understanding of the role of alternative/activist media in social movements and political activism. Additionally, research in the fields of critical platform and data studies, decolonial studies, science and technology studies, anthropology, and Black and Indigenous studies provides tools to explore several areas that are key to understanding the alternative and/or activist character of specific media; the political role of media design and network architectures; the infrastructuralization of media platforms; and how these platforms shape power dynamics. Another important focus area is how media serves as a vehicle for subjectivation against neoliberal individualism and the dehumanizing effects of data extraction, forming activists and shaping new kinds of distributed, socio-technical agency. Finally, approaches that consider the ontological and epistemological underpinning of media and data activism are crucial to reveal how specific media practices are tied to alternative world-making, challenging mainstream and Western-centric perspectives on media’s role in knowledge production and a technopolitics of care for humans and the environment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".