Transnational audiences: geocultural approaches

The exchange of information, discourse and meaning across a bewildering array of cultural, geographic and political barriers has become a central concern for a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. As such, there is a growing body of empirical work in academic journals and doctoral theses that addresses particular instances of transnational reception. It is nonetheless fair to say that as a field of study, our knowledge of transnational audiences remains highly fragmented and lacks a common conceptual or comparative framework. In the main, overarching theories of global media flows and markets continue to rest upon theoretical understandings of media reception that are largely derived from a previous epoch where media mobility and intercultural communication was not a primary focus. As a consequence, contemporary studies of transnational media reception still require a coherent geography capable of addressing the unique demands of this kind of work. There is a pressing need, th...