This episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series is a special one, marking the 10th Anniversary of Mediapolis, where we speak with Erica Stein, Elizabeth Patton and Adam Ochonicky.
Erica Stein is Associate Professor of Film at Vassar College, and a co-founder of Mediapolis, where she now serves as treasurer. Her research addresses how mediation and urbanization meet: how capital claims physical and social space through visual strategies, and how certain moving images push back against them. She is the author of Seeing Symphonically: Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York (SUNY Press, 2021), and co-editor of The Companion to Media and the City (Routledge, 2022).
Elizabeth Patton is Chair and Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and outgoing co-managing editor of Mediapolis. Her research centres on media history, identity and space, and on how media practices have shaped popular understandings of work and leisure. In her book Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office (Rutgers University Press, 2020), she explores how the idea of working from home was constructed across the 20th century. She was a 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow.
Adam Ochonicky is one of three current co-managing editors of Mediapolis, and Associate Professor of English in the School of Media, Arts, and Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. His work centres nostalgia and regionalism across a range of mediums and eras, and is drawn to the relationship between form and content: the idea that engaging critically with space calls for more than text on a page. He is the author of The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism (Indiana University Press, 2020), and came to Mediapolis as a contributor before joining its editorial team.
Our conversation took the journal’s tenth anniversary as an occasion to ask what Mediapolis set out to be and what it has actually become. We began with what we might call its founding wager: the case made in a 2016 roundtable for “small gauge” scholarship, meaning: short-form, conversational, situated work that the legacy journal system wasn’t built to carry. From there we asked which of those founding ambitions became durable features of the journal as a working concern, and which turned out harder to hold on to — a question that led into franker territory about the economics of academic labour and how a journal sustains itself when no one is being paid.
We then turned to the shifting ground beneath all of this: the platform conditions that once made nimble, responsive publishing possible, and what happens when that substrate — things like academic Twitter, the open web — thin out, financialize and decay. We ended on AI, and whether the value of small-gauge work changes when machines can produce short pieces at speed, turning finally toward voice, editorial curation, and the journal’s emerging life as a pedagogical space.
Erica Stein is Chair and Associate Professor of Film at Vassar College. Her research focuses on the spatial politics of alternative cinemas. She is the author of Seeing Symphonically: Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York (SUNY Press 2021) and co-editor of Companion to Media and the City (Routledge, 2022). In 2015, she co-founded Mediapolis with Brendan Kredell. She is currently working on a book about real estate and crime in film, video, and television.
