Conditions of Mediation was a preconference of the 2013 International Communication Association conference, sponsored by the Philosophy, Theory and Critique section. It brought together scholars from a very wide range of perspectives – such as media history, media archaeology, audience studies, political theory, metaphysics, software studies, science and technology studies, digital aesthetics, cultural geography and urban studies – to reflect explicitly on the phenomenological groundings of their work on media.

The conference aimed to go beyond a mere congregation of media phenomenologists. Instead, it encouraged critical reflection on what various readings of phenomenology might offer media and technology studies that other approaches cannot, while considering the limits of phenomenological approaches in philosophical, theoretical, political and empirical terms.

Full details on the conference, including a video of the keynote dialogues, are available at the conference website. This site also includes detail on the edited book (Peter Lang, 2018) which partly emerged from the event.