This program of research is concerned with contemporary transformations in the cultural life of Montreal, and with understanding these transformations through a theorization of their mediality. By mediality, we designate the ways in which cultural artefacts of various sorts (artistic or popular works, cultural technologies and elements of urban infrastructure) participate in the storing, transmission and circulation of cultural expression. In this sense, mediality is a property of all cultural artefacts (such as the walls on which poetic texts are inscribed and stored) and not simply of those technologies conventionally designated as "media".

This research team has been designed with two core objectives: (a) to bring together otherwise isolated research projects on the culture of Montreal, in a context of exchange and collaboration, so as to work towards an integrated study of that city's cultural forms and practices; and (b) to mobilize ongoing research on urban culture in an enterprise of theory-building which will produce new analytic vocabularies and frameworks for the analysis of culture. These vocabularies and frameworks will be grounded in a theorization of the mediality of urban life. We believe that media theory and the study of cities are most effectively renewed in moments of interdisciplinary ferment, when mediality or the city emerge as the focus of theory-building across the boundaries of field and discipline. We hope that research produced within this team will contribute to the broad renewal of media theory currently transpiring across the humanities and social sciences, a renewal evident in the work and influence of Kittler (1990), Siegert (1999), Gumbrecht (1994) and others. The research team is made up of seven scholars from the humanities and social sciences, who represent, in roughly equal measure, Francophone and Anglophone traditions of research, and a wide range of academic career stages. They bring to this team proposal a complex history of prior collaborations, shared participation on thesis committees, and convergent interests.