ABSTRACT
The term ‘acting on media’ has been proposed (Kubitschko, 2018) as a way to capture activism that focuses explicitly on media technologies, infrastructures, and policies – thus opening up media practice research to a wider range of practices beyond those that involve doing things with media. This chapter further draws out the implications of this conceptual move by problematizing the role of knowledge in media practices. While knowledge has been understood as integral to media practices, it has a contested status among practice theorists, who reject the ‘mentalism’ and rationalist assumptions of much modern social thought. Through a critical review of different conceptualizations of knowledge in practice theory, I argue that activities such as theorizing, reflecting, and analysing should themselves be treated as social practices, and that these kinds of ‘knowledge practices’ should be analysed as a core dimension of media practices. I draw on literature on knowledge production in social movements to develop a framework for analysing such knowledge practices, and illustrate the utility of this framework through a brief case study of the World Forum of Free Media, a global gathering of NGOs and activist groups that mobilize around media and communication.
