Introduction: Mediapolis at 10 and Beyond

Welcome to issue 11.1 of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture! This issue marks both a milestone and a transitional moment in the journal’s history. In 2025, Mediapolis published volume 10 in its tenth year of existence. In 2026, we embark on the journal’s second decade with the goal of sustaining our founding mission of being an accessible hub for “small-gauge” scholarship that grapples with ways in which constructed spaces and built environments of multiple scales are profoundly mediated realms. Given this concurrent retrospective and prospective agenda, issue 11.1 features a dossier that critically reviews the journal’s origins and evolution, as well as a selection of standalone pieces within several of Mediapolis’s recurring sections. 

Regarding the “Mediapolis at 10 and Beyond” dossier, the contributors’ goals include situating Mediapolis within the contexts of broader changes to academia and to the interdisciplinary fields with which the journal is engaged. To some extent, this dossier serves as something of a legacy sequel to the “Small-Gauge Scholarship” roundtable that appeared in the very first volume of Mediapolis during the summer of 2016. When revisiting that roundtable—in which contributors routinely use spatial language and images to frame Mediapolis’s principles, methods, format, and technological affordances—I was struck by the idealism permeating the journal’s founding moment. These sentiments now feel almost preemptively defiant in relation to some of the bleaker developments in academic publishing over the ensuing decade (as detailed at the end of this introductory essay). 

To begin the dossier, Mediapolis co-founders Erica Stein and Brendan Kredell each reflect on the journal’s position within past and present contexts of academic publishing. Erica details how Mediapolis emerged from a desire for sustained and varied conversations across a variety of interdisciplinary fields, such as media architecture, geography, and urbanism. This originating focus on scholarly conversation shaped the format and content of Mediapolis—which has sections for sharing resources and showcasing short-form research in collaborative and iterative ways—and remains central to the journal’s identity. Brendan juxtaposes Mediapolis’s founding vision—to occupy a space between blog and peer-reviewed journal—with the current media environment in which social media, single-authored newsletters, and platforms like podcasts, Discord, and Substack have reshaped notions of “middle-state publishing.” Longtime editorial board member Noelle Griffis shares how she integrates Mediapolis content into the classroom and proposes ways to further enhance pedagogical uses of the journal. While highlighting Mediapolis’s most accessible sections (such as Q&A and Student Voices), Noelle shows how the journal offers tiered entry points for scholarly engagement and publication, starting at the undergraduate level.

Two additional pieces broaden the scope of the “Mediapolis at 10 and Beyond” dossier. Former editorial board member Malini Guha contributes a reflective Deep Dive that revisits her previous essay about the prominence (and limitations) of anti-racist list-making during the summer of 2020. Along with analyzing artist Cauleen Smith’s drawings of book covers in her Human_3.0 Reading List (2015-2016) project, Malini contrasts the 2020 list-making moment with the absence of topical lists about Palestine during what she describes as a current “time of neutrality.” Finally, the anniversary-themed dossier features a podcast in which audio editor Scott Rodgers moderates a conversation among representatives from three generations of co-managing editors: Erica, Liz Patton, and myself. We chat about topics ranging from the evolving state of academic publishing since Mediapolis was launched to disparities between the journal’s imagined audience and actual audience to generative AI’s impacts on the perceived value and identity of Mediapolis. 

The remainder of issue 11.1 further showcases Mediapolis’s signature array of content and publication formats. Wendy Wenxin Zhang, the 2026 recipient of the SCMS Urbanism/Geography/Architecture SIG’s annual Graduate Student Essay Award, deploys multifaceted research methods in her Deep Dive on the mediated and technological facets of fisheries in China. There are two Q&As on recently-published books. On the Mediapolis podcast, Scott interviews Chris Lukinbeal about Cinematic Cartography: Scale, Analysis, Topography (Routledge, 2025). In a written exchange, Cortland Rankin interviews Michael Dwyer about Tinsel and Rust: How Hollywood Manufactured the Rust Belt (Oxford University Press, 2025). Michael also shares a Reading and Resource List that’s derived from his scholarship on the Rust Belt. 

Beyond its content, issue 11.1 brings a few changes to Mediapolis. There’s an updated publication schedule of three issues per year (spring, summer, and fall) and a new team of co-managing editors (Linda Kopitz, Cortland, and myself). On that latter note, the three of us are especially grateful to the outgoing co-managing editors, Liz Patton and Lawrence Webb, who provided exemplary models as stewards of the journal (while serving for around twice as many years as they’d initially agreed to do!) and have patiently helped us to settle into our new roles. Notably, Lawrence is staying on as the section editor for the Reading and Resource Lists. Other journal changes include the integration of the Opening the Canon section into the Deep Dives section. Following the template that Michael establishes in this issue, we also intend to continue pairing book Q&As with Reading and Resource Lists whenever it’s feasible to do so. 

Although this issue spotlights some commemorative (but still critical!) looks at the journal’s past, our overall purpose involves assessing the present state of Mediapolis so as to better chart a pathway into the future. In order to more fully contextualize Mediapolis at the decade mark, then, it’s worth briefly acknowledging some of the contemporary factors producing heightened turmoil within academia in general and scholarly publishing in particular. Such troubling conditions and concerning trends include: the closure (or proposed closure) of scholarly presses and journals; the consolidation of academic presses; the restriction of access to scholarship (via paywalls or publishing fees) by for-profit conglomerates; the impacts of AI summarizing tools on access to paywalled content and to the full breadth of scholarship within various fields; tech companies purchasing access to scholarship that’s used to train AI without authors’ consent or compensation; and the rapidly expanding problem of AI-fabricated citations and sources (a phenomenon that education scholar Ben Williamson describes as “a form of epistemological pollution”). ¹Ben Williamson, “Tracing the social half-life of a zombie citation,” Code Acts in Education (blog), January 30, 2026, https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/tracing-the-social-half-life-of-a-zombie-citation/. 

Writing in late 2025, Caroline Edwards (a co-founder and the executive director of the Open Library of Humanities) notes how many UK universities are seeking to reduce spending on library budgets for “subscriptions and licensing agreements with the Big Five commercial publishers: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and Sage.”²Caroline Edwards, “Chaos is coming for scholarly publishing,” Research Professional News, published November 12, 2025, https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-views-of-the-uk-2025-november-chaos-is-coming-for-scholarly-publishing/. For Edwards, these “uncertain times” mean that “a chaotic transition is coming as universities shift away from commercial models to cheaper, more sustainable, non-profit alternatives. . . . We can confront loss of access to expensive commercial journals by working together to move to a non-profit, community-governed publishing system.”³Edwards, “Chaos is coming.” Having begun publication in late 2015, Mediapolis already provides one such model for an alternative scholarly journal that’s proven to be durable. Accordingly, we especially assert that an independent and nontraditional venue like Mediapolis occupies an essential position in 2026 and beyond. As Mediapolis continues to evolve, we invite readers to contribute and to help shape the next phase of the journal’s lifespan. 

Adam Ochonicky

Adam Ochonicky is Associate Professor of English in the School of Media, Arts, and Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. His research and teaching primarily focus on nostalgia and regionalism across a variety of mediums, contexts, and eras. He is the author of The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism(Indiana University Press, 2020). His work has appeared in journals and collections such as Science Fiction Film and Television, Adaptation, Horror Studies, Screening the Past, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Flyover Fictions: Polarization in U.S.-American Culture, Media, and Politics (University of Nebraska Press, 2025), The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia (Routledge, 2024), and ReFocus: The Films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).