Transnational Knowledge, Methodology, and Institutions in Global Media Studies: A Dialogue with Terhi Rantanen

In this dialogue, Terhi Rantanen traces her intellectual trajectory from early disillusionment with quantitative content analysis through institutional histories of news agencies to the sociology of knowledge in Dead Men’s Propaganda . Drawing on four decades of comparative communications studies, she elaborates a critique of “methodological inter-nationalism” and advances methodological cosmopolitanism by taking cities and transnational flows as primary units of analysis. Rantanen examines how archives operate as power-shaped spaces, deploys Mannheim’s ideology-utopia dialectic to illuminate knowledge production dilemmas among the “forefront generation,” and develops mediagraphy as a biographical method for studying globalisation from below. She further reflects on how gendered and migratory locations reshape visibility in comparative communications, and considers the contemporary relevance of propaganda research amid resurgent geopolitical tensions.