The global pandemic threw the world in all its asymmetries and diversities into a limit situation without known coordinates. This article suggests that in its aftermath there is actually a call and an opportunity for more than rethinking existing keywords in the field. It argues that the crisis was “improbable” in the meaning of the word offered by Amitav Ghosh who traces a common sense forged by probabilistic science, that expelled the unthinkable from the modern imaginary. Tracking down this regime of certainty, the essay offers a discussion on the place or displacement of the disorderly, the uncertain, and the disruptive in media theory. It submits that reawakening to the improbable, in light of Karl Jaspers’ philosophical anthropology of the limit situation , offers a fruitful conceptual avenue ahead. Apart from introducing the concept of the (digital) limit situation , the article offers a conversation between existential media studies, critical disability studies, feminist STS, and the environmental humanities, by also inviting an extended family of unruly concepts, including dismediation and deferral . It concludes that limit situations can be transformative also for media theory, if we dare to seize them, by means of existential modes of transversal listening to ghostly pasts never fulfilled. Keywords the limit situation , Karl Jaspers , existential media studies , the disordely , disruptive events , the improbable , dismediation , deferral , existential listening
A few years after the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, discussions surrounding its impact have become noticeably less frequent within communication and media research. While the pandemic no longer occupies the central place it once held in academic discourse and public debate, it is now more crucial than ever to consider how this unprecedented global event has shaped our societies, as well as its lasting implications for communication and media worldwide. This Crosscurrents themed issue invited scholars to reflect on how the cultural and social implications of this global event solicit a reorganization and reframing of some of the existing conceptual and theoretical tools that have shaped media and cultural studies as a field. Contributors moved from one specific keyword to consider how these notions are imbricated by the crisis, either COVID-19 specifically or in more general terms. This editorial provides an overview to the themed issue and highlights the benefit of considering the impact of the pandemic from a broader and longer perspective, which moves away from the language and rhetoric of emergency.
The legal environment particularly the body of laws that regulate media operations are telling, yet underexplored, indicators of press freedom. Using the analytical concept of episodes of contention based on a reading of contentious politics, the article examines the ambivalent state of press freedom in the Philippines. The argument is that the protracted issues of media access and libel serve as two episodes of contention that identify extant and emerging sets of actors, mechanisms, and claims that collectively characterize the role of media law in the body politic. Drawing from interviews with journalists and review of the Supreme Court rulings about media access and libel, the hope is to underscore the potential and limits of the Court as an ally of the media in advancing press freedom. The decision of the Court does not at all times favor a liberal interpretation of press freedom but it deploys ways including dissenting opinions that can balance, if not outrightly oppose, the occasional negative view of the Court toward media-related cases.
In the following article I analyze sports bars for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) communities via a combination of semi-structured interviews, field studies, and archival research. In particular, I examine how sports and non-normative sexual and gender identities influence, and are influenced by, media "in situ." I also seek to better understand how LGBTQ+ sports cultures are constructed by the owners of these bars, by media technologies and rhythms, and by the patrons themselves. Within this approach I address how media and space overlap and inform one another, especially in relation to social and cultural imperatives, and I unpack how these interactions shape particular LGBTQ+ sports spaces. Guided by queer methodological and analytical approaches, I demonstrate how LGBTQ+ sports bars vary in material, contextual, and historical ways and how they are often influenced by competing concerns related to queer(ed) community and normative sports (media). Ultimately, I contend that to understand these spaces as built environments transformed by, and transforming of, LGBTQ+ communities, we must see them, as with most places of LGBTQ+ commerciality, as arenas of both queer potentiality and normalized inequality.
Popular discussions about the selfie have often centered on accusations of Narcissism and cultural decay. Alongside this, globally, the selfie has also been associated with accidents, injury, and death. Taking the case of India - the country most closely associated with selfie fatality statistics - this article examines how the equation between selfies and death is the result of the confluence of psychopathological and physio-pathological discourses, and virally circulating news. What medicalized discourse and sensational journalism often miss, is the fact that selfie fatalities are a symptom of technologically augmented spaces. Taking a humanistic approach drawing insights from photography studies, digital media studies, and studies of risk and modernity, the article unpacks how the moral panic around "killer selfies" obfuscates the contradictions of negotiating technological augmentation and spatial risks.
