21 pages, This article reconsiders the concept of `alternative media', and describes a set of alternative media projects produced over six years in and around migrant farm worker camps in southern California. The media projects described here (small-format videos within marginalized labor communities), challenge assumptions about `alternative media' on three levels - as a theoretical concept, as media practice and as a political project. The article argues the need to attend to the complex spatial and institutional contexts that inflect and complicate any local alternative media project. This examination of how the lived spaces of the migrant camps are both avowed and effaced by local residents and contractors underscores the tortured logic of the region. The study reveals not just how the landed status quo organizes workers lives as parts of its `scenic' landscape. It also describes how indigenous `Mixteco' labor organizers simultaneously work to exploit and resist the same conditions. Occupying semi-public contact-zones and no-man's lands (legally ambiguous spaces), provides migrants with a material beach-head from which to claim other rights that have more legal teeth (including fair labor, health and safety, and civil rights laws). Compared to the conventional video forms the producers/researchers set out to produce, these practices suggested that migrants' unauthorized occupation of space is a consequential form of `alternative media' in its own right; a transnational community response to policies of globalization and `free-trade'.
University of Tasmania, 10 pages, At the same time as overweight and obesity have come to dominate population health priorities in most western countries, food programming takes up more time on western television screens than ever before. This has resulted both in increased televisual representations of so-called ‘unhealthy’ foods (such as butter, cream and fatty red meats), and in greater public health scrutiny of the preparation and consumption of such foods. This article explores this paradox via a case study of MasterChef Australia, the most successful iteration of the popular MasterChef franchise. At a time when the ‘obesity epidemic’ has been a particular focus of Australian public health promotion, MasterChef Australia revels in the apparently ‘excessive’ use of saturated fats, especially butter, a food routinely declared by Australian health advocacy bodies as one to be avoided. This article argues that MasterChef Australia offers an alternative to puritanical nutrition discourses – not, on the whole, by explicitly contesting them, but by presenting food in ways that such discourses are largely irrelevant. The public health concerns generated by this use of butter on MasterChef Australia offer important insight into current debates about food and health, and, in particular, into the limitations of current public health communication strategies.
