Afterword: the dialectics of mediation in ‘distant suffering studies’

This article looks back to the rich contributions of this special issue so as to offer reflections on three kinds of challenges that traverse the emerging field of ‘distant suffering studies’: epistemological, conceptual and sociological challenges. It concludes by calling for due attention to be paid to the dialectics of mediation, the co-constitutive relationship among the different ‘moments’ of meaning-production in the circuit of mediation. Such attention, it argues, can substantially enhance the growing theoretical and empirical work in this important new area of Communication Studies