African Caribbean Bloggers in the UK and Alternative Voices on the Web

The research questions at the centre of this doctoral study are why and how do people of African descent in the UK become bloggers, what they blog about, what perceived benefits they derive from these activities, and their perceptions of the wider impact of their blogging.

Exploring the activities, motivations and perceptions of African Caribbean bloggers in the UK is about understanding how a group within society that is both under-represented as journalists within the news media  in the UK, and often marginalised and misrepresented within mainstream news discourse, voice themselves.

The growth of the Internet and introduction of information communication technologies (ICTs) on the web has created new publishing spaces that potentially allow anyone to become a producer of news, gaining the power to represent themselves. Blogs offer a fast and free route to media production and a moderate learning curve in terms of technical knowledge and expertise.

Examining how individuals from African Caribbean communities are engaging with this medium can provide useful insights into what social benefits individuals from minority communities derive from alternative media practices and whether the emancipatory potential of the Internet, as articulated through theories of democratization of the media, are realised in practice.

An important aspect of this study is in eliciting the perceptions of African Caribbean bloggers and their assessment of how blogging functions to challenge contemporary and discursive forms of racism often perpetuated through discourses in the news media.

This approach adopts Merten’s ‘transformative emancipatory paradigm’ in avoiding the tendency of researchers to focus on negative questions about black experiences. In contrast, at the centre of this study are the perspectives of African Caribbeanbloggers and their strategies to address historical and contemporary injustices based on cultural differences.

This study will adopt an interpretative-constructivist approach in using qualitative research methods: semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis in a hermeneutical and dialectical manner to answer the research questions.

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