In recent years, media theory has emerged as a robust and multidisciplinary field. But it remains tethered to Euro-American experience and dominant geographies of novelty and value that fail to account for the significance of media in much of the world. This working group begins from the assumption that a transnational, global or multi-sited media theory is necessary to understand contemporary cultural, social and political phenomena—from popular politics to platform economies. Here, we understand trans- and global processes as neither universalist, additive, nor simply outside the center, but rather as relations or enfoldings constituted by discrete media, platforms, infrastructures, and networks. On this basis, they help us reframe media theory as such.

Our initial research axis is what we term theory media to flip the script on familiar conceptual priorities and call attention to the ways that mediants and mediations theorize themselves. Whereas media theory approaches media, platforms, infrastructures, and networks as passive objects, awaiting the right critic to connect the dots, theory media recognizes that media, platforms, infrastructures, and networks contain their own theoretical dynamism, responding in their own ways to the same contingencies that media theory attempts to track. Our aim over the next few years is to unsettle old questions about the nature of transnational and global media by understanding the theoretical interventions media are already making.