International Journal of Communication
Publishes a Special Section
Practicing Media—Mediating Practice

Media technologies of all kinds are an integral part of our social worlds. People worldwide engage with a wide range of communication services to accomplish most of their daily activities. But how can we understand the performative dimension of such routines and their intimate ties with media technologies and with the media texts that we produce and circulate through them?  In their conspicuous ordinariness, the practices of handling media and, in turn, the mediation of contemporary practices require us to assess how and with what consequences these dual processes become embedded in our lives.

The Special Section “Practicing Media—Mediating Practice” strives for an explanation and critical appreciation of media-related practices because, as of now, we lack a clear conceptualization and analytical implementation of what media(-related) practices are (and what they leave out), what their relationship to other types of activity looks like, and what they add to our understanding of innovations in telecommunications and digital data.

Guest-edited by Christian Pentzold, Kenzie Burchell, Olivier Driessens and Alice Mattoni, this Special Section is one of the first efforts to substantiate media and communication studies’ interest in understanding the entanglement of media-related activities. The 11 original articles (plus an editorial introduction) come from an international set of scholars from media and communications, anthropology, and sociology. Their conceptual groundwork and empirical analyses scrutinize what media users actually do and say in relation to media technologies, texts, and genres, and the wider digitally networked ecologies within which those practices take place.

The contributions come from Christian Pentzold, University of Bremen & Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany and Manuel Menke, LMU Munich, Germany; Jesper Pagh, University of Copenhagen, Denmark; Alice Mattoni, University of Bologna, Italy; Stephen F. Ostertag, Tulane University, USA; Christoph Raetzsch, University of Aarhus, Denmark and Margreth Lünenborg, Free University Berlin; Asen O. Ivanov, University of Guelph, Canada; Kenzie Burchell, University of Toronto, Canada; Maria Bakardjieva, University of Calgary, Canada; and Peter Lunt, University of Leicester, UK.

We invite you to read this new Special Section of scholarly articles in the International Journal of Communication  that published May 20, 2020. Please Ctrl+Click  on the titles below for direct hyperlinking.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Practicing Media—Mediating Practice: Introduction
Kenzie Burchell, Olivier Driessens, Alice Mattoni

Conceptualizing the Doings and Sayings of Media Practices: Expressive Performance, Communicative Understanding, and Epistemic Discourses
Christian Pentzold, Manuel Menke

Managing Context Collapses: The Internet as a Conditioning Technology in the
Organization of Practices
Jesper Pagh

A Media-in-Practices Approach to Investigate the Nexus Between Digital Media and
Activists’ Daily Political Engagement
Alice Mattoni

News as Relational Social Practice: A Theoretical Framework
Stephen F. Ostertag

Anchoring Practices for Public Connection: Media Practice and Its Challenges
for Journalism Studies
Christoph Raetzsch, Margreth Lünenborg

Evaluative Practices in a Broadcasting Newsroom Archive: Culture, Context, and
Understanding in Practice
Asen O. Ivanov

Reporting, Uncertainty, and the Orchestrated Fog of War: A Practice-Based Lens
for Understanding Global Media Events
Kenzie Burchell

New Paradigm or Sensitizing Concept: Finding the Proper Place of Practice Theory
in Media Studies
Maria Bakardjieva

Beyond Bourdieu: The Interactionist Foundations of Media Practice Theory
Peter Lunt

Jumping on the Practice Bandwagon: Perspectives for a Practice-Oriented Study of
Communication and Media
Christian Pentzold

__________________________________________________________________________­­__________________

Larry Gross
Editor

Arlene Luck
Managing Editor 

Christian Pentzold, Kenzie Burchell, Olivier Driessens, Alice Mattoni
Guest Editors

 

According to the latest statistics from Google Scholar, IJoC ranks 2nd among all Humanities, Literature & Arts journals, and 4th among Communication journals.