1st Edition

The Routledge Companion to Media Audiences

Edited By Annette Hill, Peter Lunt Copyright 2025
600 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

600 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

600 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

The Routledge Companion to Media Audiences captures the ways in which audiences and audience researchers are adapting to emerging social, cultural, market, technical and environmental conditions. Bringing together 40 original essays, this anthology explores how our constantly changing encounters with media are complex, contradictory and increasingly commercialized in the modern world.... Read more

Contents

List of Contributors

Preface

Introduction to Companion to Media Audiences 

Annette Hill and Peter Lunt

PART I: AUDIENCE THEORIES AND APPROACHES

Introduction

Peter Lunt

1. Constituting the Techno-Normal: The Practices of Everyday Media Consumption

    David Morley

2. Mediations, Popular Cultures, and Cartographies: Contemporary Audiences in Latin America

    Rodrigo Muñoz-González and Ignacio Siles

3. Media Audiences as Explorers of Interpretant Signs and Vulnerable Frames

    Fernando Andacht

4. How Universalised Language Misconstrues Audiences in the “Middle East”

    Naomi Sakr

5. De-westernizing Fan Studies in the Era of Globalization and Digitization

    Yuan Gong

6. Media-Ready Feminism, Everyday Sexism, and Audience Reception:  Negotiating the Entanglements of Polysemic Televisual Texts

    Andrea Press and Sarah Johnson-Palomaki

7. From Media Audiences to Everyday Cultures and from Signifying Practice to Practical Sense

    Shaun Moores

PART II:  AUDIENCE IMAGINARIES

Introduction

Deborah Chambers

8. Broadening the Imagined Audience: The Case of “Gamers”       

    Amanda Cote and Mahli-Ann Butt

9. Platformisation and Personalisation: The making of “contingent” online audiences

    Scott Wark

10. Imagining Audiences as Media Users: Audience Research’s Role as an Imagining Institution

      Ike Picone

11. Relationship Status of Journalists with Their Audiences on Social Media: It’s Complicated                 

     Iva Nenadić and Petra Kovačević

12. Allies or Antagonists? Reconciling Engaged Journalism’s Imagined Audiences                       

      Jacob Nelson

13. When TV Shows Get More Inclusive, Yet Audiences More Divided: How to Study Fan and  Anti-Fan Communities Online

      Stéfany Boisvert and Dominique Gagnon

PART III: AUDIENCE MODES

Introduction - Audience Modes: A Granular Approach

Renira Rampazzo Gambarato

14. Transmedia (Anti-storytelling) Audiences

      Renira Rampazzo Gambarato

15. Virtual (Idol) Audiences: Canon, Fanon and Multivocality in Vocaloid Cultures

      Rafal Zaborowski

16. Immersive Audiences: Dreaming Of Living in Media                                                               

      Susana Tosca

17. Streaming Audiences: Deconstruction of Fashion Gender Stereotypes Through the Imitation of TV Series Outfits

      Antonella Mascio

18. Reactive Audiences: Carnal Videos

      Yeran Kim

19. Bored Audiences: Zoned In and Out

      Susanna Paasonen

PART IV:  AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT AND EXPERIENCES

Introduction

Annette Hill

20. Tracking Engagement in Documentary Viewing: A Critical Retrospect

      John Corner

21. When Does Documentary Cut Through? The Challenge of Tracing Documentary’s Social and Political Impact Through Audience Research

      Craig Hight and Kate Nash

22. Playing the Audience Card

      Sue Turnbull

23. Rethinking Transmedia Audiences

      Elizabeth Evans

24. Social Movements and the Self-mediation of Vulnerability on Digital Media

      Anastasia Kavada

PART V: AUDIENCES, AFFECT AND IDENTITIES

Introduction

Joke Hermes

25. ‘I Know What You Mean’. Contingency and Contextualisation: Subjects, Technology and Affect in Everyday Practice

       Ann Gray

26. Unwanted Audienceship, Audience Resilience: A Case Study of the MIRROR Incident in Hong Kong                                                                                                                                  

       Yiu Fai Chow

27. Black Audiences, Brand Voices, and Affective Communities

      Francesca Sobande

28. What’s Labour Got to Do with It? Getting (Back) To Class and Culture in Audience Research

       Helen Wood

29. Intimate Orientations: People’s Everyday Engagements with Digital Media

      Sander De Ridder

PART VI:  AUDIENCE PLACES AND ENVIRONMENTS

Introduction

Emily Keightley

30. Affective Infrastructuring as a Survival Mechanism: Unhoused Media Users and Their Media

     Maren Hartmann and Vera Klocke

31. Geometries of Power and Latin American Feminist Audiences

      María Concepción Castillo-González and Mariana Gabarrot

32. Neuroqueering Audience Research

      Anna Reading

33. Slow Reality TV and Chinese Audiences

      Annette Hill and Yunyi Liao

34. The Felt Experience of Atmosphere: Implications for Audience Research                                          

      Peter Lunt

PART VII: METHODOLOGIES FOR THE STUDY OF MEDIA AUDIENCES

Introduction  

Lynn Schofield Clark

35. Rethinking The Methodologies of Media Effects: Introducing Quantitative Criticalism

      Erica Scharrer and Andy Ruddock

36. Audience Research in a Cross-Cultural Framework: When Lofty Ideals Collide with Complicated Realities     

      Sofia Johansson and Stina Bengtsson

37. Interviewing as Building Situated Platform Knowledge: A Reflection on Interviews with Transnational Women Content Creators

      Jeehyun Jenny Lee and Anna Lee Swan    

 38. Digital Bayanihan as Method: Rethinking the Audience-Producer Relationship in Influencer Cultures

      Cheryll Ruth Soriano and Earvin Charles Cabalquinto

39. Youth Participatory Action Research: Methods and the study of audiences

      Lynn Schofield Clark, Carlos Jimenez and Johnny Ramirez

40. Integrating Autoethnography and Interviewing for Researching Child and Parent Audiences in Turkey

      Esra E. Bilgiç with Lynn Schofield Clark

Index

 

 

 

Biography

Annette Hill is Professor in Media and Communication, Jönköping University, Sweden. With 25 years’ experience of audience research, in over 100 publications, her work addresses transnational audiences for factual and fictional genres, live events, tourism and theatre, using multi methods and analytic dialogue with industry and citizen stakeholders.

Peter Lunt is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, UK. His research encompasses audience research, media regulation and the relationship between media research and social theory.

"A phenomenal contribution. It not only offers an authoritative and up-to-date survey of the field but also shows how it is being  revitalised by engagements with technological, social, geopolitical and cultural shifts. Based on the ideas presented here, audience studies represents an exciting and important set of questions, methods, and critical orientations from which to explore a rapidly changing and ever more media-saturated world."

Rosalind Gill, Goldsmiths, University of London

"No book can promise conclusions in a field that is ever expanding but it is possible, as in this companion, to offer an updated, state-of-the-art collection of research that explores various disciplinary, thematic, and regional approaches to media audiences. The future of audiences’ research is here."

- José Luis Fernández, Consulting professor and researcher on mediatizations, University of Buenos Aires