The Media and the Military: Special issue of Media, Culture & Society

A special issue on ‘The Media and the Military’ co-edited by Professor John Corner and Dr Katy Parry is now available at the Media, Culture & Society website [hyperlink: http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/39/1?etoc]

The issue uses the idea of ‘the military’, rather than ‘war’ or ‘conflict’ in order to place a focus on the activities and forms of mediation of a key range of institutions internationally, usually the armed forces of a nation. The articles in the special issue encompass a range of media forms and modes of enquiry across diverse geographical locations, with contributions from scholars based in Italy, Germany, New Zealand and South Korea, in addition to the UK.

Here is an extract from the editors’ introduction [ http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/39/1/3.abstract ]:

“Among the range of questions we wanted to pursue in this issue were those about how vernacular expressions of recent military experience (e.g. in social media, memoirs and forums) challenge or complement official accounts. We were interested in how national histories are variously put to work or displaced in the mediation of contemporary military action and in how ‘costs’ (diplomatic, economic and human, including forms of mental and physical injury) are variously calculated in relation to the mediation of military activity. Related to these questions are two more fundamental ones. First, about the connections ‘downwards’, so to speak, about the ways in which public perceptions of the military are constructed and about the tensions at work in that construction and its shifts of evaluation. Second, about the connections sideways and ‘upwards’, about the manner in which unfolding narratives concerning the military sphere and its activities become interconnected with questions of foreign policy and with wider political debates.”