Abstract
This chapter offers an introduction to the book 'Journalism, representation and the public sphere'. This book focuses on the challenges that are an intrinsic motif of transition periods like the one our societies, cultures and academias are currently experiencing in the face of digital media imperatives.
From its various perspectives, it tackles a gigantic and fundamental question that occupies scholars in one or another form: How does research reflect the never-ending flow of new ideas, drafts, risks and opportunities, overcoming borders and limits between crisis and euphoria? The chapters in this edited volume offer a rare, since versatile, view on these questions as they come from a broad variety of academic cultures that together form and shape European media and communication research. This book can be understood as a distillate of a broad commitment to excellence in research on media and communication, generated in affiliation with the annual European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School, and organised, promoted and invigorated by both junior and senior researchers from all over Europe and beyond.