Papers by Sara García Santamaría
Diasporic Epistemologies in Cuban Independent Journalism, 2024
This article examines how digital diasporic journalism changes epistemic practices in the Cuban c... more This article examines how digital diasporic journalism changes epistemic practices in the Cuban context. The last decade has seen a practical transnationalization of digitally native independent news sites in Cuba in the light of two phenomena: the emigration/forced exile of young journalists and the affordances of digital technologies, making it possible for journalists to continue reporting despite spatial dispersion. How are digital and diasporic ways of knowing changing Cuban journalists' epistemic practices? By taking a relational approach, we explore digital diasporas as a site of connectivity co-habited by multiple and hybrid traveling imaginaries. The article is based on 44 interviews with Cuban independent journalists, which are analyzed through postfoundational discourse analysis (PDA) and situational mapping. The data reveals three important epistemological cleavages that shape digital diasporic journalists' access to knowledge. These are (1) place as an epistemic category, (2) the epistemic status they confer on themselves and other social actors, and (3) the autonomy they claim when constructing clear boundaries between journalism, activism, and propaganda.
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University of Illinois Press eBooks, Apr 8, 2022
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Media and Communication, Nov 29, 2022
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“An important contribution to the study of the Cuban media landscape. Cuba’s Digital Revolution e... more “An important contribution to the study of the Cuban media landscape. Cuba’s Digital Revolution examines changes brought about by recent expansion of Wi-Fi access points through attention to how independent journalism, media distribution, activism, entrepreneurship, and media culture are developing alongside local and global technological and political changes.”—Cristina Venegas, author of Digital Dilemmas: The State, the Individual, and Digital Media in Cuba The triumph of the Cuban Revolution gave the Communist Party a monopoly over both politics and the mass media. However, with the subsequent global proliferation of new information and communication technologies, Cuban citizens have become active participants in the worldwide digital revolution. While the Cuban internet has long been characterized by censorship, high costs, slow speeds, and limited access, this volume argues that since 2013, technological developments have allowed for a fundamental reconfiguration of the cultural, economic, social, and political spheres of the Revolutionary project. The essays in this volume cover various transformations within this new digital revolution, examining both government-enabled paid public web access and creative workarounds that Cubans have designed to independently produce, distribute, and access digital content. Contributors trace how media ventures, entrepreneurship, online marketing, journalism, and cultural e-zines have been developing on the island alongside global technological and geopolitical changes. As Cuba continues to expand internet access and as citizens challenge state policies on the speed, breadth, and freedom of that access, Cuba’s Digital Revolution provides a fascinating example of the impact of technology in authoritarian states and transitional democracies. While the streets of Cuba may still belong to Castro’s Revolution, this volume argues that it is still unclear to whom Cuban cyberspace belongs.https://scholarlycommons.susqu.edu/facultybooks/1090/thumbnail.jp
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Persona y Sociedad, 2019
Este ensayo analiza el periodismo alternativo en Cuba de manera comparada, explicando cómo su des... more Este ensayo analiza el periodismo alternativo en Cuba de manera comparada, explicando cómo su deslegitimación legal y discursiva ha servido para justificar ataques tanto directos como indirectos contra los periodistas. El principal argumento es que los acercamientos positivistas pasan por alto las agresiones estructurales y simbólicas que sufren los periodistas, que son difícilmente computables. A esto se une el acercamiento occidental binario a los socialismos tardíos, que ignora la voz de los mismos periodistas y la manera en que experimentan y reaccionan a los ataques. El principal argumento es la necesidad de superar estas barreras analíticas, analizando los ataques contra periodistas alternativos desde una perspectiva interdisciplinar que navegue entre la teoría crítica (Fuchs, 2017; Rogers, 2019) y la teoría decolonial (Mignolo, 2005). Esto nos permitiría entender mejor el rechazo y el miedo que experimentan los periodistas, así como la manera en que se defienden en redes soli...
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Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 2021
This paper analyses the intimate space of politicians at home during lockdown through their perso... more This paper analyses the intimate space of politicians at home during lockdown through their personal Instagram accounts, using both live stories (which I have been saving daily), the pictures and videos they post and the accompanying text. In order to do so, it will focus on two young female politicians who have become iconic for left-wing movements around the world. They are Ada Colau, Mayor of Barcelona (Spain), and Alessandria Ocasio-Cortez, representative for New York’s 14th congressional district (USA). As previous political outsiders who are deeply involved in activism and belong to what some will call a left-wing populist wave, AOC and Colau interact with their followers in “an authentic way”, often posting very intimate and apparently uncurated images of their daily life. The goal of the paper is to examine how they construct authenticity and connect with their constituencies during the COVID-19 lockdown through a qualitative visual rhetorical analysis.
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: This paper challenges the assumption that foreign influence on a media system takes place mainl... more : This paper challenges the assumption that foreign influence on a media system takes place mainly through foreign aid campaigns. In order to do so, it looks at the way in which Cuba’s dependency on the Soviet Union has influenced the sovietisation of Cuban journalism through qualitative interviews. This is not to dismiss the importance of overt and covert foreign aid campaigns. However, the findings reveal that economic and ideological dependency had a lasting impact on the deprofessionalisation of Cuban journalism in terms of structure, intellectual freedom and journalistic practice. Resumen : Este articulo desafia la idea de que la influencia extranjera en un sistema mediatico tiene lugar principalmente a traves de campanas de cooperacion internacional. Para ello, examina a traves de entrevistas cualitativas la influencia de los lazos de dependencia de Cuba con la Union Sovietica en la sovietizacion del periodismo cubano. Esto no significa que haya que ignorar la importancia de c...
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This report aims to examine digital independent media projects in Cuba within the broader media e... more This report aims to examine digital independent media projects in Cuba within the broader media ecosystem in which they operate. More specifically, it looks at the context in which some journalists become disengaged from the Cuban institutional media system and decide to create independent spaces for debate and deliberation online. However, this research complicates the commonly believed notion that these alternative digital publications naturally catalyze debate that is both critical and oppositional. The report draws on previous literature, digital debates on political ‘centrism’ in Cuba and in-depth interviews with Cuban journalists in order to assess the way in which an intellectual elite claims a disenfranchisement of politics from the state. The report has been conducted thanks to a fellowship from the Internet Policy Observatory at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and is part of a broader project. On the academic side, it will expand into an academic paper that examines the impact of the Internet and digital technologies on (1) journalistic discourses, (2) journalist’s in-group and out-group interactions and (3) larger media structures in Cuba. On the journalistic side, it is published in parallel to the dossier The Internet in Cuba, produced by the independent magazine Periodismo de Barrio.
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Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2021
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Cuba’s Digital Revolution, 2021
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Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a unique global experience, arousing both exclusionary nationa... more The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a unique global experience, arousing both exclusionary nationalistic and inclusionary responses of solidarity. This article aims to explore the discursive and linguistic means by which the COVID-19 pandemic, as a macro-event, has been translated into local micro-events. The analysis studies the global pandemic through the initial statements of 29 leading political actors across four continents. The aim is to examine discursive constructions of solidarity and nationalism through the social representation of inclusion/exclusion of in-, out-, and affiliated groups. The comparative analysis is based on the theoretical and methodological framework of the socio-cognitive approach to critical discourse analysis and is informed by argumentation theory and nationalism studies. The results of our analysis suggest that leaders have constructed the virus as the main outgroup through the metaphors of the pandemic-as-war and the pandemic-as-movement which have e...
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Tripodos, 2020
This article examines populist leaders’ politicisation of food in their social media performances... more This article examines populist leaders’ politicisation of food in their social media performances. More precisely, it analyses Matteo Salvini’s Instagram posts during the 2019 European elections, and the way food is mobilized for populist and nationalist purposes. The main argument is that food serves as a cultural trope that confers identity, reinforcing social divisions and the terms of national and class belonging. Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1984) social critique of taste, political leaders have traditionally placed themselves on the side of a distant gastronomic culture; that of a high-end elite. However, populist leaders perform a twofold role, attempting to present themselves as part of the common people and distancing themselves from the traditional elite. This change in social positioning is reflected in their social media accounts, often posting “authentic” glimpses of their cultural practices, such as cooking and eating. Methodologically, this paper uses a mixed-methods concur...
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Media and Politics in New Democracies, 2015
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Mètode, 2011
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Media and Communication, 2022
This article examines leaders' ability to take care of the people during a global pandemic. The a... more This article examines leaders' ability to take care of the people during a global pandemic. The article focuses on two populist leaders in Spain: Ada Colau, Barcelona's mayor and a global municipalist referent, and Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid and a referent of the new right in Europe. The analysis is informed by theoretical discussions on care, examining how populists perform micro and macro practices of care(lessness) as reflected on their Instagram accounts. How has a global pandemic affected populists' unspoken role of taking care of "their people"? Do they understand care as an individual or as a collective enterprise that challenges capitalist forms of annihilation? The article takes a feminist approach by challenging traditional male-centric analyses of populism. Methodologically, the article advances our understanding of discursive, visual, and affective approaches to digital storytelling. The data is analyzed through a combination of content analysis, a performative approach to populism and visual rhetorical analysis. The results show important differences in how right-and left-wing populists create their ethos as carers and establish emotional connections with those they care about, performing radical care versus neoliberal carelessness.
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If there is one revolution that claims to have happened in the name of the people, that is surely... more If there is one revolution that claims to have happened in the name of the people, that is surely the Cuban Revolution. This thesis examines the discursive construction of ‘the Cuban people’ during the periods of national debate. More specifically, this thesis analyses ‘the people’ through the lens of national newspaper Granma during the Party-led calls for debate that preceded the IV (1991), and the VI (2011) Congresses of the Communist Party of Cuba (Partido Comunista de Cuba, PCC). I then go on to discuss the hegemonic construction of ‘the people’ with contemporary Cuban journalists, who offer competing articulations of national belonging. This thesis draws on Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) Discourse Theory, which is systematised through a combination of qualitative methods of analysis. In this work, I have analysed over 500 newspaper articles, paying special attention to historical interdiscursivity, that is, to the historical origins in which media discourses are embedded. Then, co...
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Internet Policy Observatory at the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania, 2018
This report aims to examine digital independent media projects in Cuba within the broader media e... more This report aims to examine digital independent media projects in Cuba within the broader media ecosystem in which they operate. More specifically, it looks at the context in which some journalists become disengaged from the Cuban institutional media system and decide to create independent spaces for debate and deliberation online. However, this research complicates the commonly believed notion that these alternative digital publications naturally catalyze debate that is both critical and oppositional. The report draws on previous literature, digital debates on political ‘centrism’ in Cuba and in-depth interviews with Cuban journalists in order to assess the way in which an intellectual elite claims a disenfranchisement of politics from the state. The report has been conducted thanks to a fellowship from the Internet Policy Observatory at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and is part of a broader project. On the academic side, it will expand into an academic paper that examines the impact of the Internet and digital technologies on (1) journalistic discourses, (2) journalist’s in-group and out-group interactions and (3) larger media structures in Cuba. On the journalistic side, it is published in parallel to the dossier The Internet in Cuba, produced by the independent magazine Periodismo de Barrio.
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Journal of Latin American Communication Research, 2018
This paper challenges the assumption that foreign influence on a media system takes place mainly ... more This paper challenges the assumption that foreign influence on a media system takes place mainly through foreign aid campaigns. In order to do so, it looks at the way in which Cuba's dependency on the Soviet Union has influenced the sovietisation of Cuban journalism through qualitative interviews. This is not to dismiss the importance of overt and covert foreign aid campaigns. However, the findings reveal that economic and ideological dependency had a lasting impact on the de-professionalisation of Cuban journalism in terms of structure, intellectual freedom and journalistic practice.
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Papers by Sara García Santamaría