Transmedia Geographies: Decoloniality, Democratization and Cultural Citizenship in the Age of Media Convergence

Looking at the US, New Zealand, and Central America, this book considers how cultural politics has been deeply reworked in our contemporary media environment. The authors analyze how rampant technological convergence has allowed stories to spill across media platforms as well as geographical borders and how those stories reemerge as transmediated events.

The authors explore the cultural politics that have developed within this new media environment by moving across the mediated landscapes of the first, third, and fourth (Indigenous people’s) worlds, which are deeply intertwined and interconnected under contemporary conditions of neoliberal globalization and emergent regimes of authoritarian postdemocracy. The book attends both to the platforms and digital networks of the new media environment and to the cultural forms and practices that have constituted television as the dominant medium of communication throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In the new media environment, transmediation works on behalf not only of those corporate megaconglomerates that have become all too familiar to media consumers around the world but also of many communities that have previously been excluded from access to the means of electronic textual production and circulation. For the latter, grassroots transmediation has become an important technique for the production of cultural citizenship.

Julie Cupples is a professor of human geography and cultural studies and the head of the Institute of Geography and the Lived Environment at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author or editor of a number of books, including Producing and Contesting Urban Marginality: Interdisciplinary and Comparative Dialogues (co-editor) and Shifting Nicaraguan Mediascapes: Authoritarianism and the Struggle for Social Justice.

Kevin Glynn is an associate professor of geography at Northumbria University. He is the author of Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American Television and the coauthor of Shifting Nicaraguan Mediascapes: Authoritarianism and the Struggle for Social Justice.