Media Aesthetics, Audiences, and Structures of Feeling

This research group critically examines how emotions are constructed and valued in media texts and validated or contested by media audiences. It analyses the connections between the aesthetics of particular media forms, such as television, film, and new digital platforms, as well as transmedia texts, and the complexities of affective responses. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary theories and methodologies, it aims to explore cultural texts as repositories of feelings that are bound not only to their content but also to their conditions of production, consumption, and circulation. Ethnographic audience research is a key tool in our exploration of the politics and pleasures of media use. At stake is the way in which affective life, as Ann Cvetkovich puts it, “an index of public cultures and social systems” in the United States and across the Americas.