Challenges and Futures of Critical Media Studies Seen Through the Transformations of ‘Alternative Media’

Jay Hamilton. "Challenges and Futures of Critical Media Studies Seen Through the Transformations of 'Alternative Media'." Presented at “Histories, Presents and Futures of Media and Communication,” Communication and Media Research Institute, University of Westminster (Regent Street), 22-23 May 2025.

Abstract: This paper addresses the epistemological trajectory of critical media studies, critical media practice and their possible futures by addressing the transformations of the scholarly topic and practice of ‘alternative media’. Epistemologies of critical approaches to the study of media and communication continue to exemplify the analytic value of contextuality and historicity, which beneficially and necessarily continue to enlarge the field topically and geographically. However, a crucial means of more fully avoiding a fragmented patchwork of narrowly-focused and isolated case studies is concomitant additional epistemological attention to relationality, which addresses the mutual determination of localized phenomena and their conditions. In few other topic areas can the analytic value of recovering an expanded epistemology be demonstrated than that of ‘alternative media’. Isolated case studies of progressive-left alternative media have appeared since the 1980s, with those of radical-Right alternative media since the 2000s, yet largely in isolation from each other and from a more substantial engagement with mutually-determined and determining conditions. By contrast, an expanded epistemology can better explore their mutual determination.