Class, Culture, and the Media in Greece, Volume 1 Otherness, Reactionary Politics, the Class Gaze

This two-volume work brings together studies focusing on the Greek realities of class as they appear in and through the Greek media realm. Critically engaging with traditions of class analysis, it brings to light various class perspectives and their explanatory power for the Greek context. In doing so, it embraces intersectional approaches that study class structures in their co-constructions/co-articulations with other forms of social organization and identification, such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, geography and labor. Instead of providing clear-cut definitions, the chapters reveal the complexities and relationalities of class cultures and classed selves in their making. Volume one brings forth studies concerned with intersectional questions of class, notions of otherness, and forms of exclusion as they appear in popular media genres over a variety of social issues. Further, the volume also deals with class-related issues connected to the study of reactionary, far-right, and racist content advancing in Greek public spheres.

Chapter 1. Introduction: probing perpetual crisis (Yiannis Mylonas).- Chapter 2. Misrecognizing class in the age of Covid-19: the Aspropyrgos case and the media (Giorgos Bithymitris).- Chapter 3. Housing precarisation and the reshuffling of worthiness, blame and vulnerability during the Covid-19 pandemic (Theodoros Karyotis).- Chapter 4. Invaders vs Investors: The Importance of Class in the Framing of Migration in the Greek Press (Christos Kostopoulos).- Chapter 5. Media framing of the Roma population in Greece. Racism and class politics against the indigenous “Other”: The cases of Nikos Sampanis and 8-year-old Olga (Stamatis Poulakidakos).- Chapter 6. Endoxa, regimes of truth and hatred rhetoric: Examining Golden Dawn’s online media discourses (Dimitris Serafis).- Chapter 7. Private television and the reproduction of conspiracy theories: the Greek case (Thomas Lazaridis).- Chapter 8. Religious extremism, far-right and conspiracies: A study of COVID-19 anti-vaxxers in Greece’s social media sphere (Nikos Smyrnaios).- Chapter 9. Somewhere Between Paris and Tehran: Exploring Greece’s Media-mediated Sociopolitics of Religion and their Implicit Class Connotations (Sotiris Mitralexis).- Chapter 10. Digitally mediated collective memory of the Greek Civil War: A post-memory analysis of YouTube comments (Leandros Savvides).- Chapter 11. Rebetiko: Class, migration and affective structures in the cinematographic narration of a musical genre (Maria Athanasiou).- Chapter 12. Women crossing borders in white vans: an autoethnographic account of the performance and embodiment of class in post-socialist migration (Tsvetelia Hristova).

Yiannis Mylonas is Associate Professor at the Media Institute of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, in Moscow. He received a PhD in Media and Communications from Copenhagen University, and has worked at Lund University as postdoctoral researcher. He is the author of the monograph The “Greek Crisis” in Europe: Race, Class and Politics (2019), and co-editor (with Panos Kompatsiaris and Ilya Kirya) of The Industrialization of Creativity and Its Limits: Values, Politics and Lifestyles of Contemporary Cultural Economies (Springer, 2020). He has previously published in journals such as Stasis, Critical Discourse Studies, tripleC, The Journal of Language and Politics, Continuum, Subjectivity, Race and Class, The Journal of Political Ideologies, Javnost/the Public, Nordicom Review, and Journalism, among others.

Elena Psyllakou holds a PhD in Discourse Studies (Department of Political Sciences, University of Athens), building on critical approaches to discourse analysis, media and communication. In her postdoctoral research for the project “Media in the limelight. A dialogic approach”, implemented in collaboration with the Greek National Center for Social Research (EKKE), she focused on the intersections of news media, politics, and journalistic identities in the Greek mediascape. She has been an active member of DiscourseNet. Currently she works as a Communications Expert and Research Associate in the NGOs/CSOs sector in Greece. In collaboration with the ENA Institute for Alternative Policies she contributes to projects and initiatives to enhance transparency and trust in media and journalism.