ABSTRACT
Understanding that voice is ‘not the practice of individuals in isolation’ (as Nick Couldry asserts in Why Voice Matters?) and thus requires landscapes of mediation and relationship, Chapter 2 underlines how the most renowned public space approaches are not alien to the general tendency of narrowing the realms of involvement and dissent. I take four contemporary perspectives of scholars who, at the juncture of media, communication, and social movement studies, have sought to break the settings where voice is socially discharged without major success. In this section I conclude that voice has not only been expropriated as a resource but also as a place. The latter leads to a third expropriation: the entitlement of people to have voice in a more egalitarian, horizontal, and participative way. In light of this last expropriation, I suggest that any attempt to have voice would have to be based upon a rebuilding of this entitlement and that media and communication necessarily play a role in this attempt. But what and how do they contribute to that task, what emerges, what do they confront, who do they implicate? These questions are answered in the following chapters.
