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International audience ; Simon Dawes's introduction to the inaugural issue of Media Theory.

Abstract
The year's work in book/media theory witnessed a return to three fundamental questions about the 'book': 1. What Is a Book? 2. Who Is a Book? 3. Why Books? The first section of this chapter, 'What Is a Book?', presents a group of scholars who view the book as an object that continues to elude or deny the ways in which we have come to understand it. No other thinker makes this clearer than Jacques Derrida, whose high-theory approach to the 'book' was the focus of Juliet Fleming's masterful Book Theory seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library in November 2019. Taking a more literal approach to deconstructing the book, Book Parts, a multi-author volume edited by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth, breaks down the book into its anatomical components. The next section, 'Who Is a Book?', brings together scholars from various literary disciplines—John Durham Peters, Patricia Badir, and Jonathan Senchyne—who collectively demonstrate how the book is always more than just an object to read or handle; it teems with thought, life, minds, and bodies. The final section, 'Why Books?', explores the enduring purpose, meaning, and future of books in society. Leah Price's public-facing work, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, and Michaela Bronstein's PMLA article on archiving in light of climate change, reckon with the truths about our own changing human condition that only thinking about books can lay bare.

Media theory is a new branch of discrete applied mathematics originally developed in mid-nineties to deal with stochastic evolution of preference relations in political science and mathematical psychology. However, many different examples of media can be found, ranging from learning spaces to hypercube computers, suggesting that this concept is ubiquitous. The paper presents very basic concepts and results of media theory and is aimed at a wide body of researchers in discrete applied mathematics. ; Peer Reviewed

Media theory is a new branch of discrete applied mathematics originally developed in mid-nineties to deal with stochastic evolution of preference relations in political science and mathematical psychology. However, many different examples of media can be found, ranging from learning spaces to hypercube computers, suggesting that this concept is ubiquitous. The paper presents very basic concepts and results of media theory and is aimed at a wide body of researchers in discrete applied mathematics. ; Peer Reviewed

One of the most prolific and respected scholars today, Manuel Castells has given us a new language for understanding the impact of information and communication technologies on social life.Politicians can no longer run for office without a digital media strategy, new communication technologies are a fundamental infrastructure for the economy, and the internet has become an invaluable tool for cultural production and consumption. Yet as more of our political, economic, and cultural interaction occurs over digital media, the ability to create and manipulate both content and networks

From an established author with a growing international profile in media studies, Media/Theory is an accessible yet challenging guide to ways of thinking about media and communications in modern life.Shaun Moores draws on ideas from a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and expertly connects the analysis of media and communications with key themes in contemporary social theory.Examining core issues of time and space, Moores also examines matters of interactions, signification and identity, and argues that media studies is bound up in the wider processes of the modern wo

Beginning in 2020, the Crosscurrents section of this journal featured 10 provocative essays on the theme of "Encounters in Western Media Theory." These essays stemmed from scholars' engagements with various canonical texts in media, cultural, and communication studies that took the Anglophone Global North as a taken-for-granted site for making sweeping theoretical claims. In this editorial, we reflect on the critiques and arguments that scholars have developed to move past debates about "internationalizing" and "de-westernizing" the field of media, communication, and cultural studies. Taken together, the essays published in this themed section grapple with the shifting terrain of academic knowledge production and the potential for redefining practices of reading, citation, and teaching.

Abstract