Slowly but surely, arts-based research is making its entry into Communication and Media Studies, moving away from a rather exclusive focus on written texts and oral presentations. This special issue is driven by the belief that still more could be done at the level of theorizing arts-based research practices, and at the level of deploying them in different contexts. The aim of this special issue is to further stimulate the discussion on this topic, bringing together a diversity of voices, formats and approaches.

In recent decades, digital communication and sustainability have become central topics in the global public discourse. Since the Nineties, debates about the role of computer-mediated communication in forming opinions and about human activity’s impact on the environment have been rising. “Mediatisation” of the modern society enhanced the importance of studying social processes’ communicational aspects, such as environmental sustainability’s management. In the West, in fact, after World War II mass media have become more and more instrumental to the creation of an environmental awareness conceptualising the environment as we understand it today.

CHIARA GIACCARDI, JÉRÔME BOURDON, NICO CARPENTIER, KIRSTEN DROTNER, DANA RENGA and ANDREA VIRGINÁS reflect on the current Coronavirus-induced crisis in search for sociological solutions to the political, social and economical changes that we are experiencing.

CS special issue 2/2018, edited by Mariagrazia Fanchi, Alexandra Schneider and Wanda Strauven, aims at analyzing Post-Millennials’ cinema experiences and practices.

Using different starting and entry points (based, inter alia, on journalism studies, organizational communication, game studies, discourse theory, visual communication), the collection of articles included in this special issue sheds light on the logics of political struggle. In particular, this special issue allows reflecting on the distinction between struggles over and struggles through, very much in line with Plekhanov’s distinction between the means and aims of political struggle, and his argumentation for the alignment of both in socialist strategy.

Many thought Brexit would not win and Donald Trump could not be elected. An entire media apparatus that was increasingly certain came to produce confusion instead. We are now said to be in a “post truth” time, one where debate over truth has been replaced by a chaos of facts. The more information grows, the more knowledge seems to retreat, and the thought vacuum is increasingly filled with hate speech, hoaxes, and so-called fake news. The aim of this issue is to introduce a critical perspective amidst this wave of anti-inclusionary and counter-informative forces, without falling in the equally undesirable opposites of cynical functionalism (truth is merely what works) or a new, patronizing positivism: truth as a matter of numbers, a sovereignty of data that ends up killing reality, by neutralizing its uncountable aspects.

The special issue addresses the development of the media system and creative industries in relation both to the major economic crises and to the role played by innovation in making the media – with respect to the crisis itself – assume a cyclical or anti-cyclical role.

The aim of this special issue is to explore this intersection and, consequently, the cross fertilization between fashion studies and media studies, with particular regard to audiovisual media, such as cinema, television, advertising and digital video.

The goal of issue 3/2016 – which could hardly be more timely, due to the industrial, normative, and cultural challenges that await Italian cinema after the promulgation of the Law 220/2016 – is to define what constructs the idea of quality in contemporary Italian cinema, from 2000 up to the present.

In the contemporary anthropological scenario of dualism between body and mind, exasperated by the general exposure to the mimetic desire of a divine body and of a body that is plastic, manipulable, replaceable, interchangeable, the theatre and the performing arts have the double function of criticism and of proposal, in which the development and the care of the individual people, of the community and of the social body are pursued through work with the body and on the body, singular and plural. This issue of CS is devoted to the exposition of the body in the society of images, spectacle and social media, and is divided into two sections, critical and experiential.