Helen Morgan Parmett and Conn Holohan introduce this installment of Student Voices. First, Helen Morgan Parmett discusses the themes of her seminar course, "Culture in the Mediapolis," from which student essays in the section are drawn. Morgan Parmett emphasizes the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic influenced the course and her students. Holohan then provides an introduction to the short films students' submitted as part of the section's special feature on student responses to the pandemic.
In her introduction to this installment of Student Voices, Amy Corbin contextualizes the essays in the work of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies's undergraduate conference, which she co-organized. She also provides a platform for Jeffery Lin, an invited contributor, to discuss the ongoing protests on Hong Kong and his reasons for withdrawing his essay.
Stephanie DeBoer introduces a new installment of Student Voices by situating her students' essays on Hong Kong and Shanghai in discussions of public screens, global publics, and the dispositif.
In “Ruins, Representation and the Right to the City,” Spencer Cunningham provides a deft summary of the ongoing discussion surrounding the redevelopment of the City of Detroit, exploring the aesthetics (or, rather, the aestheticization) of the city’s urban ruins, and the contradictory forces of gentrification that continue into the present day.
In “Infrastructural Inequality and Digital Divides,” Kortnee Tilson navigates through the dense theoretical content of Manuel Castells’ work on networked societies, and provides an evaluation of his insights for questions of power, inequality and access in connection with digital infrastructures.
Joshua Synenko introduces the papers featured in the inaugural issue of the Student Voices section. In it, he explains the context for his course, Contemporary Topics in Media Studies, where he had his students focus on the relationships between media and urban geography with a particular focus on urban infrastructures and geomedia. He provides brief overviews of the student work featured in the section.