The practices of participation and engagement are characterised by complexities and contradictions. All celebratory examples of uses of social media, e.g. in the Arab spring, the Occupy movement or in recent LGBTQ protests, are deeply rooted in human practices. Because of this connection, every case of mediated participation should be perceived as highly contextual and cannot be attributed to one (social) specific media logic, necessitating detailed empirical studies to investigate the different contexts of political and civic engagement. In this volume, the theoretical chapters discuss analytical frameworks that can enrich our understanding of current contexts and practices of mediated participation. The empirical studies explore the implications of the new digital conditions for the ways in which digitally mediated social interactions, practices and environments shape everyday participation, engagement or protest and their subjective as well societal meaning.

Comprising the most current scholarship from leading experts in the fields of gender and media studies, "Gendered Transformations" offers readers a new foundation from which to reexamine traditional perspectives on gender. Organized into sections concerning representational politics, embodied performance, and social constructions of reality, these essays explore a wide variety of concerns from a similarly wide variety of perspectives, from essentialist to anti-essentialist. A thought-provoking contribution to a number of disparate fields, "Gendered Transformations" offers a rare interdisciplinary approach to gender that reflects the most recent developments in media theory and methodology.

This study provides a wide-ranging critique of contemporary anti-humanist postcolonial theory. By charting a genealogy of the complicity of humanism and oppression in the New World, this analysis highlights the process of consolidation of a racialised, autonomous and rational modern subject as well as the existence of a fractured modernity. Situating contemporary Derridean critiques of humanism within the Hegelian tradition, this work demonstrates that post-modern anti-essentialism does not succeed in escaping totalisation. Furthermore, it contextualises the fractured modernity of the Western humanist tradition in relation to the works of key twentieth-century thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas, arguing that these authors problematise the common reduction of humanism to a totalising outlook, due to their revelation of the gaps and fissures prevalent in the modern. Combining insights drawn from Fanon's emphasis on lived experience, Arendt's enlarged mentality and Levinas's non-ontological transcendence, this study aims to deconstruct the complicity between humanism and colonialism.

The practices of participation and engagement are characterised by complexities and contradictions. All celebratory examples of uses of social media, e.g. in the Arab spring, the Occupy movement or in recent LGBTQ protests, are deeply rooted in human practices. Because of this connection, every case of mediated participation should be perceived as highly contextual and cannot be attributed to one (social) specific media logic, necessitating detailed empirical studies to investigate the different contexts of political and civic engagement. In this volume, the theoretical chapters discuss analytical frameworks that can enrich our understanding of current contexts and practices of mediated participation. The empirical studies explore the implications of the new digital conditions for the ways in which digitally mediated social interactions, practices and environments shape everyday participation, engagement or protest and their subjective as well societal meaning.