SAGE Journal Articles

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Journal Article 1: Madianou, M. & Miller, D. (2012). Polymedia: Towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 16, 187.

Abstract: This article develops a new theory of polymedia in order to understand the consequences of digital media in the context of interpersonal communication. Drawing on illustrative examples from a comparative ethnography of Filipino and Caribbean transnational families, the article develops the contours of a theory of polymedia. We demonstrate how users avail themselves of new media as a communicative environment of affordances rather than as a catalogue of ever proliferating but discrete technologies. As a consequence, with polymedia the primary concern shifts from the constraints imposed by each individual medium to an emphasis upon the social, emotional and moral consequences of choosing between those different media. As the choice of medium acquires communicative intent, navigating the environment of polymedia becomes inextricably linked to the ways in which interpersonal relationships are experienced and managed. Polymedia is ultimately about a new relationship between the social and the technological, rather than merely a shift in the technology itself.

 

Journal Article 2: Brooker, W. (2010). ‘Now you’re thinking with portals’: Media training for a digital world. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 13, 573. 

Abstract: Using a range of examples from contemporary popular culture, this article argues that our increasing engagement with the world as data, through digital technology, involves new vocabulary, gestures, conventions and conceptual models: new ways of seeing, acting and thinking. Drawing on the theory that 1920s-cinema offered, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, a ‘kind of training’ for the new modes of operation required by the modernist city, it suggests that contemporary popular narratives are currently serving a similar purpose, training us in the uses of digital technology and emphasizing the social mastery that results from understanding the world as data, and learning to read it, navigate it and manipulate it.

 

Journal Article 3: Powell, K. J. (2016). Making #BlackLivesMatter: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the Specters of Black Life—Toward a Hauntology of Blackness. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16, 260.

Abstract: This article situates the loss of Michael Brown and Eric Garner within the affective resonance of the Transatlantic Slave Trade’s afterlife. Building upon critical theories of performance and memory that position nonexistence as the generative force of Black life, I interrogate the activism sparked by the untimely death of Brown and Garner as a performative, death-derived absence dramatized through the bodies of protestors. Engaging the body as the confluence of agential presence and deathly absence, I develop a hauntology that questions how to make Black life matter through a reworking of the relationship between the Transatlantic Slave Trade’s affective ecologies of nonexistence and blackness.