Key Questions

Media@McGill examines communication as a cultural, political and intellectual phenomenon at the core of modern life in Canada and worldwide. Our internationally recognized faculty studies ever-changing cultures of images, movement, sound and light; media technologies and cultural forms and the policies that govern them; new theories of communication and the history of ideas; the interconnections of media, knowledge and politics; and the ethical foundations of media and communication. We work across media, across regions, and across intellectual disciplines and historical epochs to examine key sets of questions such as those listed below:

Communication Politics

  • What does "the right to communicate" mean?
  • Is the culture of technology a culture of citizenship? How can media practitioners and users collaborate to promote citizenship?
  • Is propaganda anything more than the strategic movement of messages and resources?
  • Why does innovation in political communication so often occur at the margins of the political spectrum?
  • What is the ideal role of the state in media regulation? How can media contribute to a just and equitable society? What is justice in communication?

Communication Technology

  • How have communication technologies changed the experience of rootedness and migration, home and exile?
  • How do media technologies come together, change and fail?
  • What are the emerging relationships between communication technologies and biotechnologies; and among media, minds and bodies?
  • Do emerging digital media signal an important cultural transformation?

Media and Culture

  • In what ways do media shape the relationship between the global and the local?
  • What is the place of Canadian culture in an increasingly global media landscape?
  • How do media "soak up" the creative energies of city life?
  • Why are crimes, criminals and victims such staples of mainstream news culture?
  • What role do media play in storing our cultural memories? What is the value of an audiovisual artifact?

The Means and Ends of Communication

  • How do history, knowledge, power and communication constitute each other?
  • How do media interact with what they communicate?
  • How do intangibles like expression and empathy circulate?
  • Why does more knowledge lead to more questions?
  • Can we communicate?

 

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