I’m happy to announce that on 31 March 2020, I will be hosting a public discussion with Charlotte Brundson (Warwick), Zlatan Krajina (Zagreb), David Rowe (Western Sydney) and Deborah Stevenson (Western Sydney) on the notion that media studies might be experiencing an ‘urban’ moment.
The discussion is inspired by the release of the Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication – though the main event is not a book launch as such. Rather, it will be a critical debate involving the book’s editors, some of its contributors, and of course those who attend. If you’d like to attend, and hopefully (optionally) also take part is the discussion, do book your place now.
The discussion will also be filmed, and will appear later this Spring as an audiovisual feature in Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture.
A description of the event (from the Birkbeck Events listing) is below.
URBAN MEDIA NOW
When: 31 March 2020, 18:00 — 20:00
Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square, Keynes Library
Is media studies experiencing an ‘urban’ moment? Inspired by the release of the Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication, Charlotte Brundson (Warwick), Zlatan Krajina (Zagreb), David Rowe (Western Sydney), Deborah Stevenson (Western Sydney) and Scott Rodgers (Birkbeck) explore the genealogies, present tendencies and future possibilities of the urban as a key locus for the increasingly diverse fields that compose media, communication and cultural studies.
The new Routledge Companion provides a thought-provoking lens into the process of academic knowledge production in a fast-changing research area. The result of a multi-year process, its resulting 44 chapters are notably wide ranging, taking in the urban-mediated dimensions of everything from architecture, infrastructure, digitalisation and regeneration to globalisation, identity, consumption and branding. On first blush, the book seems to aspire at being comprehensive, even encyclopaedic; but on closer inspection, its chapter authors also clearly orient themselves to the current moment. One aim for this symposium is to consider the inherent tensions that seem to be at play in a book like this, between for example old and new media forms, as well as longstanding and emerging ways of studying and conceptualising media, communication and culture.
Yet we will also go beyond the book and consider what it represents more generally. Why has the urban become such an important lens into media now? Have particular, immanent features of urbanisation and mediatisation in the 21st Century encouraged and indeed necessitated this growing field? Might it also be that trends in the academy, such as for example the valorisation of inter- or trans-disciplinarity, are part of the explanation as well? And if there really is an ‘urban moment’ in media studies, might (or should) it eventually subside?
Contact name: Scott Rodgers
Speakers
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