Overview

An exploration of life through a transdisciplinary lens. LIFE: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry explores life through the lenses of relationships among communication, nature, and society. The contributors, who come from the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, investigate everyday life and expand upon an integrative account of media as environments and technologies. By including collaborations from internationally known scholars from the physical sciences, life sciences, cognitive sciences, and the arts, LIFE addresses issues from a transdisciplinary perspective, emphasizing how information and communication are instrumental in and for living systems.  

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9781789387933

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Reviews

‘Tolle Lege — though rarely apropos, this stunning book meets the criteria. Destined to be a classic, it revolutionizes communication studies. The impressibility of life systems is imagined globally through sophisticated research. Instead of marginalia and augmented scholasticism, these profound essays teach us innovation and gravitas’. -- Clifford G. Christians, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ‘Undertaking an ambitious intellectual journey, this volume traverses realms of material cultures and lifeworlds, ecologies and symbolic systems, ethics and being. It delves into our deeply mediated world that is nonetheless embedded in nature and embodied in life forms large and small, while addressing some of the most meaningful and existential questions facing humanity, the planet and beyond’. -- Jack Linchuan Qiu, National University of Singapore ‘The editors ask us to zoom both in and out to see how we consider life itself, with eye-opening implications for understanding communication and its possibilities. As biofabrication and artificial intelligence become entwined with human existence, the questions are urgent, timely and fascinating’. -- Lana F. Rakow, University of North Dakota ‘Extending perspectives from media and communication research into life sciences, this second collection in the transdisciplinary series both widens and deepens the reader’s understanding of information as, at once, a material and a symbolic phenomenon’. -- Klaus Bruhn Jensen, University of Copenhagen ‘In the early 21st century, a philosophy of openness marks, embraces and encourages exploration, collaboration and synthesis across traditional boundaries. This journey encourages us to rethink our relationship with the natural world and challenges us to see life as an intricate dance of interactions, transactions and contexts’. -- Changfeng Chen, Tsinghua University

Author Information

Jeremy Swartz is the founder of Metamedia @ UofO, curator and co-director of the What is...? series, courtesy research associate in Media Studies at the University of Oregon, and adjunct assistant professor in Communication at Southern Oregon University. He is co-editor of MEDIA: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry (Intellect/University of Chicago Press 2021) with Janet Wasko.   Janet Wasko is a professor in Media Studies and Knight Chair in Communication Research Emeritus at the University of Oregon. She is the author or editor of 23 books including MEDIA: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry (Intellect/University of Chicago Press 2021) with Jeremy Swartz, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy, 2nd ed. (Polity 2020).

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