Digital media studies futures

Abstract

Television and media studies embraced diverse methodologies as scholars sought to interrogate textuality, social contexts, economic and industrial imperatives, and policy and audience formations. Media studies has always existed on the fuzzy boundary line (or border war, depending on your perspective) between the humanities and the social sciences; its hybrid nature has often provoked debates about the future of the field. Current prescriptions for the future of media and cultural studies from John Hartley and Graeme Turner provide new directions for researchers; our attempt here is to add to their provocations and think through some of the research and collaboration opportunities of digital media studies futures while pointing toward the economic, institutional, and disciplinary challenges of further enriching and hybridizing media studies. While we take seriously the critiques made by Graeme Turner (2012) against a small slice of scholarship on creative industries, new media studies, and/or convergence culture studies, we find it important to stress the variety and depth of digital media scholarship as well as the theoretical and methodological vigor of “new” media studies. We also want to stress a wider array of digital media scholarship than Turner acknowledges and point to the ways that critical race, feminist, queer, postcolonial and globalization scholars interrogate digital poetics and politics and open up new pedagogical and research horizons. As scholars interested in game studies and digital media studies, we argue that future media scholars will need to do even more to talk and work across disciplinary boundaries. Game studies and digital culture studies are not simply media studies. Computer scientists, software studies scholars, game designers, designers (in fields from interaction design to human computer interaction to industrial design), cultural anthropologists,