Geography’s Media Turn: Exploring the Digital, Affective, and Unseen

This edited volume examines how the arts and sciences have had to adapt, engage, confront, and even alter research, teaching, and community service because of modern media. The book describes how academics work with and through the media in their daily and professional lives. The acceleration of changes to media in the digital age has been astounding whether due to social media, web 2.0, new sensor technologies, fake news, or the rise of a post-truth news media economy. Many academics became media producers during COVID-19 having to engage in emergency remote teaching. Further, as academics, we can no longer publish our results and expect a metered response from all entities but rather must promote and defend our work in the media and the classroom. There is almost no part of academic work, let alone human life, that is not affected by media. Many academics across the sciences and humanities now embrace the media as part of their daily practice and actively engage in media production through building podcasts and convergent media sites, managing online courses and degree programs, or being administrators or educators who interact with the media regularly at local, national, or international scales. The chapters are original and written by a group of interdisciplinary junior and senior scholars from various world regions.

Chris Lukinbeal is the founding Director of Geographic Information Systems Technology Programs at the University of Arizona, USA, and Professor of the School of Geography Development and Environment. He earned his PhD in Geography from San Diego State University and University of California, Santa Barbara. Chris is a cultural geography and cartographer with research interests in representation, visualization, media, and cinema.

Stan D. Brunn labels himself as a cosmopolitan Middle Westerner who has graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Ohio State University. He has traveled in more than 110 countries and taught at universities in the U.S., Caribbean, China, South Africa and Europe (>15). His research interests are broad including political, social, economic, communications and has written/edited books on social and political geography, time/space, urban, COVID, mapping, religion, language, stamps and nationalism, and ad hoc geographies.