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Alternative/Activist Media and Practice

2025· reference-entry· en· W4412418894 on OpenAlex
Alessandra Renzi

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueOxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication · 2025
Typereference-entry
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicSocial Media and Politics
Canadian institutionsConcordia University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAlternative mediaSociologyMedia studies

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.032
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.906
Threshold uncertainty score0.990

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.032
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.112
GPT teacher head0.456
Teacher spread0.344 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it