This short article provides an overview of the various theoretical and methodological approaches to analysing neoliberalism, paying particular attention to political-economic and governmental approaches (and the extent to which they can be contrasted or combined), and argues for a more theoretically- and methodologically-informed, interdisciplinary critique of neoliberalism in media studies. In emphasising the heterogeneity of approaches to studying an object such as neoliberalism, as well as the differences in how those approaches are deployed in different ‘studies’, it will thus also argue for the applicability of such concerns to research in multiple disciplines in other countries (such as France) as well.

This article sets out some of the analytical moves that are necessary to developing a distinctive area of research called postcolonial memory studies. A key barrier to synthesising insights from postcolonial and memory studies has been a reductive approach to analogue and digital technologies which operate as vehicles for memory. Three analytical moves are needed to decentre, or at the very least de-naturalise the technological narratives and ecologies of Europe and the US. Media memory studies needs to draw more effectively on postcolonial studies to position mediated memory as inextricably connected to the legacies of colonialism and empire; develop a much broader account of media infrastructures emerging from what is increasingly characterised as ‘global media studies’; make an empirical and analytical shift away from the primacy of digital communications technologies and to explore technologies, not just as artefacts but as knowledge generating cultural practices. The combined value of these three shifts in approaches to media and communications technologies in memory studies research has considerable potential for developing postcolonial media memory studies research which offers a thorough and empirically grounded analysis of the complex ways in which the legacies of colonialism shape and structure the ways in which practices and performances of remembering are mediated in contemporary social life. This shift towards postcolonial memory studies can be seen as part of the wider project of what Anna (Amza) Reading has in this volume called ‘rewilding memory’ by rethinking ‘the underlying ecologies of knowledge within studies of memory’.

Over the past decades, the field of memory studies has produced a wealth of research on explicit (conscious, commemorative, official) collective memory. But beyond this realm of the visible, there is a largely hidden world of ‘implicit collective memory’. Elements of this invisible world include narrative schemata, stereotypes, patterns of framing, or world models, which are usually not explicitly known or addressed, but get passed on from generation to generation – in order to shape perception and action in new situations. Implicit collective memory is pervasive and powerful. But it is difficult to trace. It is therefore time to join forces for its systematic study: Drawing on approaches from psychology, sociology, communication studies, anthropology, media culture studies, literary studies, and mnemohistory, this article proposes some building blocks for a future transdisciplinary field of research on implicit collective memory.

Studies that locate memory entirely within the head may pay less attention to the properties, practices or cultures of the media with which people remember than studies of ‘memory in the wild’, where memory is seen to extend beyond the individual, into the distributed activities of people and material things. While memory in the head is, apparently, individual and susceptible to universal effects, memory in the wild is emergent and relational. Studies of memory in the wild, therefore, produce results that are harder to pin down but may form a stronger basis for interpreting the importance of context. It is an important, interdisciplinary challenge to reconcile evidence from studies based on these different conceptions, so that we can better understand how people remember and forget, individually and collectively, and the relationship between context, environment, and memory. I argue that wherever memory is located or studied, all remembering can be framed as in the wild, and that doing so supports ecological validity, conceptual precision, reflexivity, and realistic application of conclusions beyond the research context. A key part of my argument is that the relationship between media, technology, and memory is situated, highly complex, and not easily generalisable. Remembering in the wild supports the conceptual precision needed to understand the subtle and entangled implications of technological change in relation to memory.

The emergence of Islamic television in the Arab Middle East is usually explained as part of a Saudi media empire fueled by neoliberal petro-dollars. This article, by contrast, takes seriously the role ideas played alongside changing political economies in the origins of the world’s first Islamic television channel, Iqraa. Focusing on the intellectual and institutional career of “Islamic media” (al-i’lām al-Islāmī) as a category from the late sixties onwards in Egypt, I argue that Islamic television is part of a broader decolonization struggle involving the modern discipline of mass communication. Pioneering Arab communication scholars mounted a quest for epistemic emancipation in which the question of how to mediate Islam became inextricable from the question of what made media Islamic. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I show how the idea of Islamic media involved a radical reconceptualization of the Qur'an as mass communication from God and of Islam as a mediatic religion. This positing of an intimate affinity between Islam and media provoked secular skepticism and religious criticism that continue to this day. I conclude by reflecting on how the intellectual history of Islamic media challenges dominant framings of epistemological decolonization as a question of interrogating oppressive universalisms in favor of liberatory pluralisms.

After the ‘CNN effect’ concept was coined two decades ago, it quickly became a popular shorthand to understand media-conflict interactions. Although the connection has probably always been more complex than what was captured in the concept, research needs to be updated in order to better understand the multifaceted contemporary environments of both media and conflict. There are growing numbers and types of media sources, and multiple interactions between media and conflict actors, policymakers and engaged publics from the local to the global and back. We argue that understanding the impact of media reporting on conflict requires a new framework that captures the multilevel and hybrid media environments of contemporary conflicts. This study provides a roadmap of how to systematically unpack this environment. It describes and explains how different levels, interactions, and forms of news reporting shape conflicts and peacebuilding in local, national and regional contexts, and how international responses interact with multiple media narratives. With these tools, comprehensive understandings of contemporary local to global media interactions can be incorporated into new research on media and conflict.

This essay examines surveillant practices that subject sex trade clients (“clients”) to socio-legal control. In particular, I employ the concepts of the gaze, voyeurism, and exhibitionism to unpack the surveillant dynamics, and consider how power and pleasure are harnessed, produced, and thwarted in the increasing scrutiny of the sex trade’s demand side. I further examine my own research of the regulation of clients within this analytical framework. Following David Lyon’s insights on the scopophilic dimensions of surveillance (2006), I argue that the instrumental goals of surveillance are interconnected with a voyeurism that gratifies the pleasures of looking at, categorizing, defining and making sense of, clients. Yet, bearing in mind the multi-directionality of the gaze, I also analyze the controlled exhibition of sex work signifiers, as information is not just gathered, but also displayed and performed.