This field focuses on the conceptualization and interpretation of media and communication processes in cultural and historical contexts from a broad interdisciplinary perspective. We combine a variety of interpretive, qualitative, historical and critical approaches in media and communication studies. Our research deals with the history of the media, theories of communication (both historical and in contemporary digital culture), the connection between language and technology, questions of ideology and social critique, analysis of popular culture, philosophy of media and communication, algorithmic culture and artificial intelligence, witnessing and collective memory, communication and religion, and the ethics and aesthetics of communication technologies.

 

Research topics of department faculty members in this field include:

Prof. Menahem Blondheim

* The beginnings of real-time media: telegraph, fax, telephone

* Media in the American Civil War

* Jews, Judaism and the media, from the earliest days until the kosher phone

* Cultural infrastructure in the development of the high-tech sector in Israel

Prof. Paul Frosh

* Witnessing and media

* The aesthetics of media

* Cultural production and media industries

* Collective memory and visual culture

Prof. Amit Pinchevski

* Theory and philosophy of communication and media

* Testimony, memory, trauma and media

* Ethics of communication

* Disability studies in communication

Dr. Ido Ramati

* The relationship between technology, language and society

* Media spaces: the archive, the library, the museum

* Algorithmic culture, machine learning and artificial intelligence

* Imaginary media