Introducing Mediated Geographies and Geographies of Media

Abstract

While “media geography” has coalesced in recent years as an identifiable subdiscipline of human geography, media geography did not emerge from a linear history, nor does it have a clearly defined or singular focus. Compiling this edition, participating in media geography networks at conferences and elsewhere, and teaching media at our respective institutions have all abundantly revealed that media geography is a subdiscipline with many different routes and trajectories. People come to identify as media geographers as a result of an interest in a particular medium such as film, television or radio, through the literature on the Internet and geographies of cyberspace, through critical and popular geopolitics, through questions of development and the digital divide, through media and cultural studies, through communication studies, through scholarship on the city and urban studies, and through GIS, the geoweb and geospatial technologies. Media geography intersects with social and cultural geography, development geography, political geography, feminist geography, economic geography and GIS. One of the major contributions of media productions, spaces and analyses are the opportunities they offer for providing an entryway into understanding places and communities that we may otherwise rarely, if ever encounter—but this can be problematic when the identity and places that are being marked as yours, no longer appear recognisable, representative and/or desirable. The contributions in this collection pay close attention to such opportunities and challenges posed by a range of media formats, contexts and methods. These diverse entry points make for a rich emerging field in which a number of voices and perspectives are present. The field is further complicated and enriched by scholars in media studies who have turned to human geography and human geographic concepts, in order to take space, place and scale seriously in their analyses of media texts, industries and audiences. Given the diversity of the field, we thought it valuable as editors to write three position pieces that situate our work, and us personally, within the broader project represented by the scholars in this volume.