This panel presents four case studies in which the status of mediation is, in fact, a theory of how things happen in the world and of who counts as an agent of social transformation. Together, the papers sketch a history of field formation in which media figure as paradigmatic sites, means, and styles of cultural contestation. They demonstrate how a fulsome range of actors from several arenas made use of technologies, styles, institutions, and genres to order social standing.

The first two papers excavate postwar mind-body theories that understood self and social reproductions as media productions. In “How Mother Became a Medium,” Hannah Zeavin turns to mid-century conceptions of mothering in the human sciences to show that pediatric etiology was itself a media theory. Just as media forms were understood as mother proxies, metaphors for media were employed to describe and classify the newly psychosocial mother. In “The Cybernetics of Beauty,” Jeff Nagy unearths the surprisingly fleshy legacies of information theory through the bodywork of Ida Rolf and Maggie Lettvin. These public access bodywork gurus remediated circuit training from a cognitive and computational endeavor to a matter of reaching home viewers via television screen.

The second papers locate the emergence of media studies in 1970s New York. In “When We Talk About Media: Origins of the Field” Erica Robles-Anderson argues that the academic field arose as a form of historical literacy alongside austerity politics. Media studies’ legacy of preoccupation with technics as historical causality has much to do with teaching individuals to regard civilizational transformation in terms of sensory experience rather than social and political contestations. To close, in “The Early Culture Wars Were About Media, But Not in the Way You Think,” Fred Turner regrounds the origins of the “culture wars” in the image-making practices of feminists in the New York art scene. He argues that their works modeled new kinds of personhood and citizenship on the left. In parallel, Turner shows how media usage on the right was anchored in conflicting affordances of different media technologies that aimed to produce conservative religious subjects for an information age.

Together, these papers posit that media crystallized as a topic for intellectual inquiry precisely because the foundational understandings of how persons, societies, and polities are constructed were newly up for grabs.