ABSTRACT
This section begins with some theoretical considerations on the philosophical and ethical foundations of media studies, in the shape of Bill Schwarz’s self-reflexive meditation on the intellectual and institutional development of the discipline. His reflections on its specificity are informed both by his personal experience of moving between disciplines (those of history, English, cultural studies, and media and communications studies) – as well as by that of his own children, in encountering media studies as it is now institutionalised, in a rather mechanical form, in the UK school system. One of his central questions concerns the relative absence in our field of foundational texts – apart from Raymond Williams’s canonical Communications (1962) – with a comparable status to that of books like E.H. Carr’s What is History? (1969) or C. Wright Mill’s The Sociological Imagination (1970) in the disciplines of history and sociology. In this connection, he offers a critical review of a series of recent attempts to make good this absence in our field. However, he argues, on the whole, media studies still lacks a coherent philosophical foundation that would address the broader (and in part ‘imaginative’) questions concerning the philosophy and history of the concept of communication, which would be the proper concern of a poetics or ethics of the field (a topic also pursued by Nick Couldry in Part III).
