Textural Democracy

Abstract

Over the last two decades critical communication and media scholars have variously argued that social spaces, material conditions, and semiotic practices form the terrain of our political horizons. As an introduction to this special issue, we argue for a texturalized conception of democracy as a way to articulate the historical relations among space, materiality, and mediation.

Keywords:

• democracy
• space
• mediation
• materiality

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the authors for their contributions to this introduction, and the respondents for their insightful feedback along the way.

Notes

1. By now there have been so many turns (the linguistic turn, the aesthetic turn, the rhetorical turn) that one would be excused for being a bit dizzy. But at least the metaphor of turning implies a spatiality.

2. The number of essays in critical communication studies has grown steadily from the first instances published in the 1980s. Early examples of attention to space include Darryl Hattenhauer's (1984) essay on semiotics, rhetoric, and architecture, and Lawerence Rosenfield's (1989) analysis of New York's Central Park as a space of civic virtue. Carole Blair, Marsha Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci's (1991) critical analysis of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial is often cited as a watershed essay in communication studies of space. For a more extensive analysis of contemporary studies of space within communication studies, see, Blair, Dickinson, and Ott (forthcoming).

3. We are following Andrew Wood's (2009) citation of this passage in Lefebvre. We returned to Lefebvre to help with this argument after reading Wood.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donovan Conley

Donovan Conley, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA

Greg Dickinson

Greg Dickinson, Colorado State University, USA