With apologies to those outside London and SE England (a video version will be available this Spring in Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture) URBAN MEDIA NOW 31 March 2020, 18:00 — 20:00 Birkbeck, University of London Keynes Library 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD London, UK Book your place now: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/booking/event/11570 Is media studies experiencing an ‘urban’ moment? Inspired by the release of the Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication, Charlotte Brundson (Warwick), Zlatan Krajina (Zagreb), David Rowe (Western Sydney), Deborah Stevenson (Western Sydney) and Scott Rodgers (Birkbeck) explore the genealogies, present tendencies and future possibilities of the urban as a key locus for the increasingly diverse fields that compose media, communication and cultural studies. The new Routledge Companion provides a thought-provoking lens into the process of academic knowledge production in a fast-changing research area. The result of a multi-year process, its resulting 44 chapters are notably wide ranging, taking in the urban-mediated dimensions of everything from architecture, infrastructure, digitalisation and regeneration to globalisation, identity, consumption and branding. On first blush, the book seems to aspire at being comprehensive, even encyclopaedic; but on closer inspection, its chapter authors also clearly orient themselves to the current moment. One aim for this symposium is to consider the inherent tensions that seem to be at play in a book like this, between for example old and new media forms, as well as longstanding and emerging ways of studying and conceptualising media, communication and culture. Yet we will also go beyond the book and consider what it represents more generally. Why has the urban become such an important lens into media now? Have particular, immanent features of urbanisation and mediatisation in the 21st Century encouraged and indeed necessitated this growing field? Might it also be that trends in the academy, such as for example the valorisation of inter- or trans-disciplinarity, are part of the explanation as well? And if there really is an ‘urban moment’ in media studies, might (or should) it eventually subside? __________________________________ Dr Scott Rodgers Senior Lecturer in Media Theory Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, 43 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1H 0PD Tel: +44 (0) 203 073 8370 | Email: s.rodgers@bbk.ac.uk<mailto:s.rodgers@bbk.ac.uk> Blog: publiclysited.com<http://www.publiclysited.com/> | Web: bbk.ac.uk/culture/our-staff/scott-rodgers<http://www.bbk.ac.uk/culture/our-staff/scott-rodgers> | Twitter:rodgers_scott<https://twitter.com/rodgers_scott>