Published: 2025-09-30

Towards Media-Cultural Communication: A Metatheoretical Reflection on the Research Practices of Humanistic Media Studies

Dagmara Jaszewska
Kultura Media Teologia
Section: Artykuły i rozprawy
https://doi.org/10.21697/kmt.2025.63.01

Abstract

This text serves a dual purpose: it functions as an editorial introduction to the second part of the issue “Cultural Communication in the Media – Media in Cultural Communication” and as a metatheoretical analysis of the concept of cultural communication. It shows how this concept—understood both as a cultural practice and as an emerging research perspective—first took shape within the reflective work of the Department of Cultural and Artistic Communication at UKSW (which gives the text a partly autoethnographic dimension), and was later developed through conference discussions and editorial work. The articles collected in the volume are treated as case studies that expand and specify this perspective. The analysis, drawing on meta-analysis, interpretation and discourse analysis, demonstrates that cultural communication shapes communities—both online and institutional—and that media transform their functioning and the content circulating within them. These communities undergo processes of aesthetization, popularization and heightened visibility characteristic of digital culture. Online communities act as laboratories of change, with their practices and meanings subsequently permeating larger institutional communities. As a result, traditional communities—such as artistic, religious or political ones—undergo democratization and gradual transformation into media-cultural communities. The text concludes by indicating further directions for research on the relationships between media, culture and the transformation of contemporary communities.

Keywords:

cultural communication, media-cultural communication, cultural communities, digital culture, aesthetization of culture, democratization of communities, mediatization of religion, meta-analysis, institutional autoethnography

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Citation rules

Jaszewska, Dagmara. “Towards Media-Cultural Communication: A Metatheoretical Reflection on the Research Practices of Humanistic Media Studies”. Kultura Media Teologia, vol. 63, no. 3, Sept. 2025, pp. 6-28, doi:10.21697/kmt.2025.63.01.

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