Amateur Media and Participatory Cultures

Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes is an Affiliated Lecturer in new and digital media at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge; Fellow and Tutor at Clare Hall; and a member of the Cambridge Digital Humanities Network and the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement. She is the author of Visual Histories of South Asia (co-edited with Marcus Banks, 2017) and of British Women Amateur Filmmakers: National Memories and Global Identities (with Heather Norris Nicholson, 2018), and has written extensively on the theme of colonial amateur film practice and imperial studies. Motrescu-Mayes is also the founder of the Amateur Cinema Studies Network.Susan Aasman is Associate Professor at the Media Studies Department and Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Groningen. Her field of expertise is in media history, with a particular interest in amateur film and documentaries, digital culture and digital archives, web history and digital history. She was a senior researcher in the research project 'Changing Platforms of Ritualised Memory Practices: The Cultural Dynamics of Home Movie Making' (2012–2016). Together with Andreas Fickers and Jo Wachelder, Susan has co-edited Materializing Memories: Dispositifs, Generations, Amateurs (2018).

• IntroductionChapter 1. From marginal to mainstream: a history of amateur mediaChapter 2. Everyday complexities and contradictions in contemporary amateur mediaChapter 3. The non-ephemeral amateur media and constructions of self Chapter 4. The politics of ethical representation in amateur mediaChapter 5. Memory and amateur media’s visual counter-historiesChapter 6. Lost and found: amateur media in the archiveAfterword

As one of the founders of this new field of research, I can vouch that we’ve been all waiting for this type of book on amateur media. The authors have carefully considered the last decades of research done on the theme of amateur media practice, from home movie making to digital and online productions, and raised pertinent theoretical issues as well as opened new research avenues. A timely and important book. Professor Roger Odin, Emeritus Professor of Information Sciences and Communication at Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle.This fiercely original book widens amateur media cartographies by recalibrating with interdisciplinary methodologies, global visualities, and participatory media platforms. It insists amateurism is not marginal, but ubiquitous as its variegated practices migrate across histories, ethics, counterhistories, archives, technologies. A massively significant, daring, rigorous, and field-changing intervention into amateur media studies.Patricia R. Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies, Ithaca College, USA