Mapping Media

Abstract

This issue addresses a ‘spatial turn’ in communication or media studies. By becoming attuned to the specificities of place, research inevitably becomes embedded within real-life situations that acknowledge the similarities but also differences between localities brought about by, for example, processes of uneven development, local variations in social organisation and the articulation of creative networks that are critical to the cultural production industries. The field of media studies is still opening up to the productive possibilities that come with a primacy on the specificities of place. Her we begin a survey of this spatial turn in media studies by collating articles that are concerned with a variety of mediascapes and their relation to places and spaces.