Dear Air community, After nearly two years of preparation, our 26 scholars-multi author-position paper 'Towards Mapping and Defining Critical Hype Studies: Multidisciplinary Insights and Future Directions' is finally out! 🦄 We hope that this position paper will stand as inspiration across academic, industry, civil society, activist, and other social circles, aiming to become a key reference for future hype-related research. https://zenodo.org/records/18764034 📖 The paper offers a programmatic analysis of the field of critical hype studies, acknowledging and identifying intellectual origins and research and hype literacy agenda, theoretical-methodological frameworks, a summative potpourri of our wide authoring team's empirical works, an attempt to capture our dilemmas and obstacles in pursuing critical hype studies, and...a long list of bibliography. And while we recognise academic overlaps with studying *Trends, Buzz feeding**, Vision Assessment* or the *Sociology of Expectations*, we understand Hype Studies as a distinct academic research field that tries out new avenues. See here why--> https://hypestudies.org/blog/is-hype-studies-just-sociology-of-expectations-... 🎊 It is worth noting that we decided to release the paper independently through the Zenodo depository, using the 21 co-authors' judgements and satisfiable review - we are nevertheless exploring options to publish with a scholarly journal as well - so more news on this to come! All the best, J.Bareis in the name of the members of Hype Studies https://hypestudies.org/