Re-Understanding Media

“This brilliant collection thrillingly updates and interrogates Marshall McLuhan’s work, with abundant insights from feminist and critical race studies. Starting from the insight that ‘the medium is the message,’ Re-Understanding Media refuses the idea of technology as a mere tool, instead showing how it is a structuring form of power—from incubators to platform heels to facial recognition scanners. A challenging and important book.” - Rosalind Gill, City, University of London

“From wires, sidewalks, platforms, and records of Black escape to technologies of containment, fabrication, and incubation, the essays and conversations in this innovative collection bring new insight and crucial analysis to Marshall McLuhan’s media theory. Re-Understanding Media is rich with feminist methods of extending, troubling, and undoing disciplinary modes of knowledge production at the McLuhan Coach House, within media studies, or elsewhere.” - Simone Browne, author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

“Correcting the lack of feminist and critical race considerations in the body of work of media ecologist Marshall McLuhan, [Re-Understanding Media] explores the gender and racial power dynamics inherent in media technology. . . . The various modes of analyses presented—such as semiotic analysis, autoethnography, and interviews—also demonstrate the breadth of methodologies used in feminist and critical race media studies. Highly recommended.” - K. Gentles-Peart, Choice

"[B]rings together a number of interesting and insightful essays. The contributions are quite readable, and suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses covering the subject of technology, especially communication technology—indeed, there is a significant need for these kinds of readings that are contemporary in their orientation." - Lance Strate, Communication Research Trends

"Re-Understanding Media’s rich provocations to the field and its foundations make it a work of clear and compelling interest for media theorists and feminist scholars, artists, and activists in and outside the academy—if not, perhaps, a heartening read for devoted disciples of McLuhan." - Eden Rea-Hedrick, The Communication Review

"Re-Understanding Media ... will be of interest not just to feminists and critical race theorists but to anyone moved by McLuhan’s perception that media forms inflect human relations. Dialogue between these two lines of thought is long overdue." - Niall Stephens, International Journal of Communication