Abstract
This Themed Section brings together the work done by CEDAR – an AHRC funded European consortium of audience researchers, who, at an early stage in their careers came together to map trends, gaps and priorities emerging over the past decade in the field. The consortium was born towards the end of European COST Action – Transforming Audiences Transforming Societies – which, over four years, reflected a substantial amount of passionate interest in the changing field of audience research. Media environments had changed, thereby putting question marks around our previously stable categories of texts and readers. The ways in which people engaged with their media environments, to what purposes, and in which ways – had all changed reflecting not only the affordances (Hutchby, 2001) of technologies around us, but the diverse ways in which people used the media in personal relationships, across distance and boundaries (Madianou & Miller, 2011), for a variety of political and civic purposes (Carpentier 2011, Livingstone, 2013). Ultimately, as it stood in 2015-2016 – audience research could only be defined with great difficulty, for it had spread its roots amongst a variety of sub-fields and new fields, and yet – people continued to do (their own kind of) audience research. So what had happened over the past decade that would allow audience researchers today to make sense of what the field looks like now? Which were the burning conversations and what new paradigms of looking at the field were being proposed?....