Asserting disadvantaged communities' deliberative agency in a media-saturated society.

This article investigates how communities experiencing poverty can exercise their deliberative agency in a media-saturated society. While empirical research on deliberative democracy tends to focus on the role of mini-publics in giving low-income households the opportunity in small-scale, carefully designed forums to characterise, justify, and reflect on their views, such conception of deliberative agency gets lost in the picture once deliberative theory begins thinking in systemic terms. This article proposes a remedy to this theoretical and analytical gap by characterising the hypermediated character of the deliberative system and identifying possibilities for communities experiencing poverty to maximise the affordances of digital media for them to make an appearance in the public sphere, speak in their own voice, and carry the embodied and storied character of their arguments. I present two illustrative cases drawing on the experiences of families with low income directly affected by the bloody war on drugs in the Philippines who utilise photojournalism and online music streaming to break in the public sphere and engage in systemic deliberations about the drug war. These examples demonstrate how communities experiencing poverty express their deliberative agency amidst fear, trauma and deprivation and democratise a media-saturated deliberative system under an increasingly authoritarian regime. Overall, this article hopes to strengthen the link between normative media studies and democratic theory and offering possibilities for reforming the public sphere that recognises the poor's deliberative agency.

Medical populism.

Medical emergencies are staple features of today's 24/7 culture of breaking news. As politics becomes increasingly stylised, audiences fragmented, and established knowledge claims contested, health crises have become even more vulnerable to politicisation. We offer the vocabulary of medical populism to make sense of this phenomenon. We define medical populism as a political style based on performances of public health crises that pit 'the people' against 'the establishment.' While some health emergencies lead to technocratic responses that soothe anxieties of a panicked public, medical populism thrives by politicising, simplifying, and spectacularising complex public health issues. To demonstrate the concept's analytical value, we offer four illustrative examples. Thabo Mbeki's HIV denialism and the Philippines' vaccination scandal are examples of the populist logic of forging vertical divisions between the people and the establishment (e.g. the West, big pharma, medical experts). Meanwhile, the Ebola scare and Southeast Asia's drug wars are examples of horizontal divisions that divide the 'virtuous people' against 'dangerous outsiders' (e.g. racial minorities, drug addicts) whose 'threats' have long been overlooked by out-of-touch members of the political and medical establishment. The article concludes by examining the implications of medical populism to health communication and democratic politics.

From authoritarian enclave to deliberative space: governance logics in post-disaster reconstruction.

One would be hard-pressed nowadays to find any practitioners and scholars in the field of post-disaster reconstruction who would argue against the virtues of community participation. In practice, however, the legacy of community participation has been mixed. This paper pursues this line of inquiry by examining the manifestations of participation in three communities affected by Typhoon Haiyan that struck the Philippines on 8 November 2013. The findings suggest that different governance logics emerge in each of the three case studies: authoritarian; communitarian; and deliberative. These logics promote particular understandings of who should participate in the reconstruction process and the appropriate scope of action for citizens to express discontent, provide feedback, and perform democratic agency. The paper contends that design interventions in participatory procedures, as well as contingencies in wider social contexts, shape the character and legacies of community participation. It concludes by comparing the legacies of these three 'governance enclaves' and imagining possibilities for participatory politics in post-disaster settings.