Communications, philosophy, film and video, digital culture: media studies straddles an astounding array of fields and disciplines and produces a vocabulary that is in equal parts rigorous and intuitive. "Critical Terms for Media Studies" defines, and at times redefines, what this new and hybrid are[...]

Mic check! Mic check! Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In "Occupy", W. J. T. Mitchel, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors' lead and perform their own resonant c[...]

Essays examine the way stories are told, understood, and used to represent and make sense of the world[...]

Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According to W. J. T. Mitchell[...]

The phrase 'War on Terror' has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Nor will it be, W. J. T. Mitchell argues, without a grasp of the images that it spawned, and that spawned it. Exploring the role of verbal [...]

W.J.T. Mitchell-one of the founders of visual studies-has been at the forefront of many disciplines such as iconology, art history and media studies. His concept of the pictorial turn is known worldwide for having set new philosophical paradigms in dealing with our vernacular visual world. This book[...]