"This is an important contribution to the scholarship of media studies and to research about international images of countries and how these are connected to what is visible through the media. ... Overall, the book is an important analysis about nations, media and visibility, which can help to advance the understanding of this complicated, but fundamental turning point for Brazil. It also offers insights to studies of other impactful events in various countries, such as the insurrection in the US." (Daniel Buarque, Nations and Nationalism, April 20, 2022) "Image of the Nation During Brazil's 2013 Protests, is thus a stimulating piece to enrich debates ... . And this text gives us elements to enrich that analysis, and to understand and embrace the fact that in the dangerous exercise of being and making something visible in a society crowded by screens ... . César Jiménez-Martínez invites us to see them, to see their practices, strategies and conditions in a relevant work for the field of media and communications." (Jorge Saavedra Utman, The International Journal of Press-Politics, January 27, 2022)
1. Introduction: The June 2013 Protests and the Image of Brazil.- 2. Theorising the Image of the Nation: Contestation, Media and Visibility.- 3. Before the June Journeys: The Contested Visibility of the ‘New’ Brazil.- 4. The Visible Nation: The Media Coverage of the June Journeys.- 5. Strategies of Mediated Visibility: Replacement, Adjustment and Re-appropriation.- 6. Conditions of Mediated Visibility: Routines, Norms, Technologies and Commercialism.- 7. Conclusion: Beyond the Visible, Beyond the June Journeys.
César Jiménez-Martínez is Lecturer in Global Media and Communications at Cardiff University, UK. His research interests include media and nationalism, nation branding and public diplomacy, media globalisation, media visibility, and social movements, particularly in the context of Latin America.
This book explores the struggles over the mediated construction and projection of the image of the nation at times of social unrest. Focusing on the June 2013 protests in Brazil, it examines how different actors –authorities, activists, the national media, foreign correspondents– disseminated competing versions of ‘what Brazil was’ during that pivotal episode. The book offers a fresh conceptual approach, supported by media coverage analysis and original interviews, that demonstrates the potential of digital media to challenge power structures and establish new ways of representing the nation. It also highlights the vulnerability of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ media to forms of inequality and disruption due to political interferences, technological constraints, and continuing commercial pressures. Contributing to the study of media and the nation as well as media and social movements, the author throws into sharp relief the profound transformation of mediated nationhood in a digital and global media environment.