Intermap

The Intermap website and blog presents news, opinions, and research on issues related to communication-centric foreign policy, public diplomacy, global media and news flows. More broadly, this site aims to investigate the intersections between communication, media studies and international relations scholarship that deal directly with how global controversies and politics are carried and sustained through media. We call this media argument: where media outlets, technologies, and tactics represent the symbolic and visual space for the contest of ideas between nations, citizens, non-state actors.

Our focus here on media argument presents a number of avenues for critical inquiry and discussion – from institutional and political constraints shaping international broadcasting policies, to the analysis of news media framing, to investigating ecological transformations introduced by networking technologies. Analysis is warranted, because our understanding of persuasion, identification, and information diffusion is changed in the increasingly crowded global media environment. Therefore, we aim to inform, synthesize, and add to contemporary debates on the use of global media to cultivate attitudes and to be the proxy space of international conflict.

The website joins the growing community of weblogs that already deal with public diplomacy, international broadcasting, and the broader conceptual issues of strategic communication and new media proliferation. This website hopes to add to the conversation, with an emphasis on the contributions of related (but often disconnected) strands of research in mass communication, rhetoric & argument studies, international politics, and media studies. These contributions can ideally provide a research-oriented context for the rapid pace of news and information pertinent to the study of international communication and public diplomacy. Much like the excellent COMOPS Journal, critical attention to these topics is not redundant, but valuable contributions to public discussion.

The previous incarnation of Intermap was a product of a research program looking at Arab media as a space for controversy about the United States. While that project has concluded, Intermap will continue to be a venue for posting information about related research projects, events, and proposals by the authors and the broader community of readers.