Utopian Media Studies

Category: Publication

There is growing sentiment within new media studies that the work of researchers must not only diagnose current issues around media, but also provide strategies for hope. As a recent issue of the journal Media Theory indicated, critique is not a silver bullet for the concerns of media, as it comes “with its own intellectual and political limitations” (Phelan et al 2024: 3). Nonetheless, critique remains a fundamental and necessary activity to articulate the matters of concern that are the roiling subtext of contemporary life: from surveillance capitalism to data colonisation, from labor exploitation to ecological disaster. Yet how do media studies researchers move with and beyond critique? To what degree is it possible for research to provide meaningful and hopeful perspectives that, at a minimum, enable just forms of coping with the contemporary plurality of crises and sow the seeds of thought and actions that lead to human and non-human flourishing? Special Issue Topics Submissions may include (but are not limited to) explorations of the following topics: Media theorists, collectives, and projects that have contributed to media studies’ utopian tradition. The utopian disciplinary visions of the political economy of communication, feminist media studies, new materialism, cybernetics, the environmental humanities, etc. Media studies collectives / conferences / working groups dedicated to critiquing and reconstituting digitally mediated societies. The genres of utopian media studies research such as the manifesto, participatory research with civil society, new media art and design, the speculative or fabulatory final chapter of monographs, policy recommendations reports. The role of hope, optimism and utopian thinking in the study of technology. The ways a utopian media studies can avoid the traditional perils, risks and exclusionary mechanisms associated with utopian thinking. Reflections on how utopian and hopeful thinking can inform, shape and re-orient media studies methodologies. Distinctions between the planetary and the local when it comes to media utopias. The question of how utopian traditions can be more structurally integrated into media studies programs and curricula.

Initiator(s):
Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

Deadline: 01.03.2025
Publication-Type: Article / Journal

https://textaural.com/utopianmediastudies/

Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein