Currents in media studies over recent decades have not only expanded the range of scholarly inquiries into once-marginalized historical and cultural subjects, but broadened our recognition of what constitutes media in the first place. Indeed, inherently decentralizing studies of the networks, industries, infrastructures, and ecologies of communication have reinforced and deepened the push to recover suppressed histories and offer alternatives to dominant frameworks and narratives; excluded subjects often come into view where the signatures of mediation are at their most dispersed.

Present challenges to academic inquiry along lines of difference and representation foreground the nature of exclusion as a form of mediation. How might the field of media studies respond to these challenges? Alongside the demand for a renewed commitment to studies that recover histories under threat of erasure, does this moment call for methodologies that attend to media’s silencing and occluding functions? How must we reexamine and extend the resources of media studies to confront the limits of visibility and the contemporary techniques of exclusion?

The theme of this year’s Media Aesthetics Summer Institute, “Excluded Media,” means to confront this dilemma. Participants will encounter scholarship that actively combats historical and contemporary suppression, proposes new methodologies, and reasserts the value of aesthetic apprehension against the withering effects of desensitization. At the same time, this convening will also encourage participants to confront the blind spots of media aesthetics that pose the greatest risk to the field’s continued growth.