International Journal of Communication
Publishes a Special Section on Urban Media Studies
Media have come to pervade nearly all aspects of urban living. They are a relevant part of urban infrastructures and play a key role in sustaining urban functions. At the same time, they inform urban routines and practices, and mediate public appearance. No urban process can be fruitfully understood without taking into account these constitutive forms of mediation.
At the same time, it is not possible to adequately address our relationships with media in contemporary cities without considering the urban character of media-related practices. It is in the urban context—a densely populated and highly infrastructured space where people are brought together through corporeal or technologically mediated copresence—that specific forms of communication take shape and become normalized. Thus, none of the established perspectives in media studies—whether that of democracy and participation, production and technology, representation and use, or belonging and identity—can claim to have an exhaustive understanding of their problematics without appreciating the urban dimension.
This Special Section on The Mediated City Between Research Fields: An Invitation to Urban Media Studies argues for a wider recognition of “urban media studies” as an emerging and vibrant scholarly space for research conducted across the borders of media/communication studies and urban studies; the goal is to shed light on the mutually constitutive entanglement of media, in all their multiplicity, and urban phenomena.
Guest-edited by Simone Tosoni, Zlatan Krajina, and Seija Ridell, this Special Section features six original articles (plus an editorial introduction) that interrogate the urban-media nexus from the standpoint of issues as diverse as the historical development of consumer capitalism (Cesare Silla), street photography and new forms of flâneurism (Ilija Tomanić-Trivundža), sport megaevents (Sami Kolamo and Jani Vuolteenaho), urban protests (Tetyana Lokot), and episodes of xenoracism reported in social media (Zlatan Krajina). This collection is complemented by an academic interview with Professor Will Straw, who lectures on urban media studies at McGill University in Canada and whose work represents one of the few pedagogical attempts to link the two fields.
The articles propose different ways to bridge the canons of urban studies and media studies in order to address the co-constitutive nature of media and urban phenomena.
We invite you to read this new Special Section of seven articles in the International Journal of Communication that published October 23, 2019. Please Ctrl+Click on the titles below for direct hyperlinking.
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The Mediated City Between Research Fields: An Invitation to Urban Media Studies – Introduction
Simone Tosoni, Zlatan Krajina, Seija Ridell
Photographic Flâneur, Street Photography, and Imagi(ni)ng the City
Ilija Tomanić-Trivundža
Uncanny Resemblances? Captive Audience Positions and Media-Conscious Performances in Berlin During the 1936 Summer Olympics and the 2006 FIFA World Cup
Sami Kolamo, Jani Vuolteenaho
The Augmented City in Protest: The Urban Media Studies Perspective
Tetyana Lokot
Understanding Encounters for Urban Media Studies: Civic Intercourse, Screen Technologies, and Cultural Difference
Zlatan Krajina
Practicing Urban Media Studies: An Interview With Will Straw
Simone Tosoni, Seija Ridell
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Larry Gross
Editor
Arlene Luck
Managing Editor
Simone Tosoni, Zlatan Krajina, Seija Ridell
Guest Editors
USC ANNENBERG PRESS 