no. 1

Rio de Janeiro Out of Synch

As Rio de Janeiro celebrates its 450th anniversary, it conjures a narrative of citizenship and progress aligned with "civilizing" nationalism. Media ranging from online portals to photographic archives have been recruited to service this project. In this Deep Dive, Nilo Couret examines two documentaries that complicate its dominant narrative about the city.

The Moving Image of Coney Island

The traveling exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008 has been featured in several American museums over the past year, and is currently on display at the Brooklyn Museum. Josh Glick, a key participant in the construction and the curation of the exhibit, reflects on his experiences, especially on his work to integrate film into the museum experience.

Syllabus: The “Inner City” in American Film

In this On Teaching feature, Amy Corbin explains the conceptual process, materials gathering, and schedule structuring that went into the creation of her undergraduate course on "the inner city," focusing especially on how she encouraged to grapple with and unpack the assumptions behind the course's central term.

Urban Affairs Association conference review

While media and urban studies have been increasingly entwined in recent years, their major disciplinary conferences, SCMS and UAA, have been less so. In this edition of Counterparts, Josh Gleich explores his experiences as a media scholar attending the Urban Affairs Association Conference.

From the Editors’ Desk

We find ourselves in a time in which media and the city increasingly mutually constitute one another and, in turn, delimit our everyday lives. The Editors of Mediapolis explore how this situation inspired the creation of this project, and what its goals will be.