Culture Machine’s special issue Media Populism is now available to access, guest-edited by regular GEM Lab contributors Joaquín Serpe and Giuseppe Fidotta, and lab director Joshua Neves. The international open-access journal’s 2020 volume grows out of and builds on the Lab’s 2017-18 Seminar in Media and Political Theory on Populism working groups and conference.
The editors write that “one of the important aims for us was to build theoretical bridges between political theory (and social sciences at large) and the humanities. In this sense, some of the things we were concerned about was the lack of specificity and the lightness with which the concept of populism is used by media and cultural scholars. At the same time, the use of media by political science was not satisfactory to us. We wanted to consider the productivity of the term populism when thinking about/through media and contemporary politics as it is very often used in a derogatory fashion.
Needless to say, we are really happy about the publication and for having created a platform where scholars who are initiating their careers publish alongside established and prolific academics.”
The volume features an introduction and companion essay by the editors, alongside contributions from past and present Concordia students, including recent graduate and McGill post-doc Patrick Brodie and former student Weixian Pan (NYU Shanghai), as well as faculty members Kay Dickinson and Ishita Tiwary. Congratulations to everyone involved!