Migrant media practices and rethinking media pluralism

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• CMPF: Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom Programme

Drawing on fieldwork with migrant populations in Italy, this seminar shows how institutional frameworks for media pluralism can be enriched by looking more closely at how audiences actually live their media environments.

Media pluralism indicators have largely developed around institutional dimensions — laws, regulators, ownership structures. However, audiences, which are growing in complexity, are increasingly turning away from the very traditional media environment those indicators describe, depending more and more on informal and unregulated channels. 

Drawing on fieldwork with migrant populations in Italy, taken as a paradigmatic case of this shift, this seminar aims to open up a conversation about what audience-level research could contribute to existing frameworks and what those frameworks, in turn, could offer to sharpen and ground fieldwork of this kind. 

Rather than presenting this as a gap to be filled, the seminar treats it as an open methodological question: where institutional and lived measures of pluralism might inform one another, and how that convergence could be built in practice.