Mediatization in Leicester's African Caribbean Community An ethnographic exploration of generational media uses in community, friends and family.

This thesis centrally considers the role of media in the formation and development of communities through a qualitative study of the African Caribbean community in Leicester. The project explores the maintenance of connections between family units and the social changes that impact the home and community, such as adult children moving away from home and reverse migration to the Caribbean. The project explores how these changes impact the community's survival and maintenance and mediatization in mitigating or compounding such developments. The study comprised ethnographic research conducted in 2018–19, with 21 participants within the community (13 first-generation and eight second-generation), seeking to illuminate individual experiences of multiplatform media within a new media environment. The research identified varieties of practices utilised within a diasporic Caribbean community and considered how these relate to the formation and development of Caribbean identities and migrant family experiences in the United Kingdom.

Additionally, this research explores how social practices of the African Caribbean Leicester community have been shaped by the Windrush Generation, who arrived in the UK between the late 1940s through to the 1970s. Members of this community sought to maintain their connections with the Caribbean whilst simultaneously seeking to secure greater positive visibility in the face of negative stigmatization within the UK. Members of the UK's African Caribbean community were treated as 'outsiders' deemed to be distinct from a racialised norm of 'Britishness'. The specific, relational term 'outsiders' draws from Norbert Elias and John Scotson's work in their paradigmatic community study The Established and the Outsiders (1965). It is used in this thesis as a theoretical model to explore inter- and intra-group tensions in the formation of a diasporic Caribbean community. Exploring the various relationships within the Caribbean diasporas will help understand how they connect to homelands generationally and UK's experiences.