Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott and adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), incorporates the media of film and photography and utilizes various filmmaking techniques, including cinematography, sound effects, and dialogues, to reflect on the complex relationship between humans, technology and power. Through cinematographic techniques such as light and dark contrast, shifting eye-level and high camera angles, as well as geometric patterns, the film portrays a technologically-advanced futuristic city and its underlying issues of power struggles and social hierarchy. The portrayal of replicants, through static and moving images and sound effects, emphasizes their close resemblance to humans, particularly their performance of emotions, and how technology alters the fundamental concept of humanity. Photography, as a medium, captures an unreliable and incomplete moment of childhood to expose the dystopian nightmare of memory manipulation that severs the connection between memory and identity. This article analyses Blade Runner as an intermedial narrative that highlights the tension between the deceptive appearance of a futuristic city, with flying cars, replicants, and other technologies created for human convenience, and the harsh reality of posthuman crises such as social hierarchy, technological dominance, memory manipulation, and replicant rebellion.

American sculptor David Smith moved fluidly between media to elicit the kind of aesthetic reaction that he believed was unique to and inherent in modern art. As remediation of his sculpture, Smith’s photography attains its own performative power by establishing a new aesthetic relationship with its spectators. This article applies Lars Elleström’s medium-centred model of communication to the analysis of the intermedial quality of David Smith’s photography. By emphasizing the significance of mediality and communication, it offers a new interpretation of the transmutation of modern sculpture as an alternative to modernist aesthetics. In this way, this case study of David Smith’s photography functions as an initiative of expanding the research of intermediality beyond formalistic analysis, by integrating art history with communication and media studies.

Samuel Beckett’s corpus centres on the characterization, examination and imaginative exploration of the human mind, encompassing the realms of consciousness, cognition and perception. In his teleplays, this focus is distinctively achieved through the performances of different media, which this article refers to as ‘intermedial performativity’. This term not only designates the semiotic contents of performance in intermedial forms, but also highlights the cooperative performances of the material media themselves, along with their uncharted possibilities and effects. This article delves into the ways in which intermedial performativity in Beckett’s teleplays realizes several unique configurations of the human mind, such as its split state and its transfiguration to a posthuman condition. This exploration not only sheds light on Beckett’s artistic vision and cosmic ontology, but also brings attention to the reverberations and implications of intermediality for humanity and its potential transformations.

Animation and live-action are two closely related media, which are foremost distinguished by the ideas and conventions surrounding them. The diverging discourses around animation and live action have tended to focus on animation as something constructed to represent characters and settings and on live action as something capturing actors and sets representing characters and settings. This difference between constructing and capturing, along with the perceived indexicality of the photo, is what seems to suggest live action as the preferred medium for documenting real events. Sound effects, in the form of recorded and edited sounds of objects, actions and environments, are of particular interest here, as they can be considered to balance somewhere between these poles of construction and capture, between the non-indexical and indexical, and ultimately between representation and reproduction. In this article, I will focus on aspects of ‘truth’ (understood as corresponding to some external reality) and ‘realism’ (understood as a representation of external reality) and how something comes to be perceived as truthful or realistic in animated documentaries in relation to the role played by sound effects. By discussing the Danish film Flugt [Flee], I will show how sound effects can aid in creating representations of truth.

As a theatrical phenomenon, cross-dressing performance has passed down through many centuries and manifested itself in different parts of the world. In the era of film and television, it was adapted to and has appeared on screen, as a popular means of entertaining the audience, and so plays an important role in influencing public opinions on certain social and cultural issues, such as the politics of gender and interculturalism. In light of theories of gender performativity and cultural agency, the intermediality of cross-dressing performance is approached in this article, mainly based on a careful analysis of Li Yugang’s solo shows on TV, the Chinese film Farewell My Concubine, and the American film M. Butterfly. By having the intermedial intersected with gender and interculturalism, this article argues that intermedial cross-dressing performance, on the one hand, has transformative power over gender politics, as it contributes to the gradual acceptance of differences in gender as well as other social categories. On the other hand, in some cross-dressing performances on screen, the subversive and the reiterative are blended together in cross-dressing performance, which undermines the legitimization of sexual orientations outside of the heterosexual norms. In addition, the entanglement of intermediality and interculturalism in cross-dressing performance in such a film as M. Butterfly contributes to critical reflections on cultural and categorical boundaries, which has profound implications for cross-cultural communications.

The preservation of declining xiqu heritage through remediation and transmediation has often been ineffective in attracting a wider audience. The Cantonese opera film White Snake (2021), with its unusual utilization of computer-generated technology and transgressive combination of various media, offers a fresh approach to popularizing xiqu among younger audiences. To overcome aesthetic differences between cinema and xiqu, the film transforms medium specificities and transmedial potentials of Song landscape paintings and martial-arts film, adapting them to a new scenic and choreographic setting. By altering the original play’s sensory and semiotic modalities, White Snake’s transmedia aspects blaze a new trail for popularizing xiqu heritage for a new generation.

Based on a rough conceptual divide of (parts of) media studies, including intermedial studies, this article presents two positions based on interests in media as transmission and representation, or media as ecological frame, or media agency. Following that, the article discusses how a new concept in environmental studies, ‘environing media’ or ‘environing technologies’ – where representation and media ecological agency seem to find a fruitful meeting point – is discussed in more detail. That description and discussion are put into a debate with central ideas of intermedial studies, before the final part of the article briefly exemplifies the theoretical ideas in the case of the IPCC report’s Summary for Policymakers (2021).

Comparing source and target media products is the main intermedial method for studying adaptations. The inventory of similarities and differences produced by such an endeavour provides evidence for the processes of transfer and transformation that have happened between the two media. But the finished media products are not the only traces of the process of adaptation. In practices of adaptation that happen inside media industries, such as film adaptations, the process is also documented in different forms and for different archival or market-oriented purposes. The process of film adaptation is, for instance, usually captured – although in fragments and in a staged format – by intermediary filmic media products – such as ‘making of’s – that are rarely considered as the main study objects in adaptation studies. As this article argues, such processual ways of looking at adaptations do not undermine the importance of comparative approaches but complicate the grounds for comparison. Suggesting a methodological shift to the process, the article expands this idea through a cross-pollination between adaptation studies and (media) production studies and exemplifies it through discussion of examples and one extended case study.

In this article, I will try to offer both a French perspective on academic activism and a perspective based on my field of competence, that is, the social sciences and humanities. The social sciences and humanities differ from the natural sciences in many respects, but they also share some common properties, among which the most important is their common institutional belonging to the academic field. Nowadays the impact of wokism has added a common concern for the autonomy and quality of our working conditions.

Philosophers have described several approaches for scientific research, including causal inference and induction, the hypothetico-deductive method, inference of the best explanation, Bayesianism or causal network analysis. Prescriptive truth is dependent upon the values that one brings into scientific inquiry. One may oppose the writings of Bertrand Russell and Helen Longino. The former argues that values may negatively impact inquiry, while Longino argues that value-free research does not exist, and we must cope with it. However, Longino proposes a very stringent value-system which does not allow certain research to be conducted. The problem arises when prescriptive truth becomes hypertrophic, self-righteous, rigid, and unconnected to reality, which is the transformation into ideology. Ideological intrusion into science and medicine, such as with Social Justice Ideology (SJI), is indeed a problem in Western democracies. It derived from scholarship originating in the humanities (law, social sciences, branches of philosophy, etc.) and then transferred to Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM). The STEMM field was thought to be immune to SJI because of its rigorous methodology, but the hyper-specialization and absence of training in the humanities made it vulnerable to SJI. These intrusions into STEMM and the amplification in the last 2–3 years are potentially due to ‘concept creep,’ psychogenic contamination, herd behaviour and, for activists, strategical equivocation (motte-and-bailey fallacy).

This article examines the violation of longstanding scientific norms, in particular universalism, objectivity, and truth orientation by new identity policies such as the principle of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI). The imposition of this principle by public opinion, administration, and mass media, particularly in the United States but also in other countries, contradicts the principle of equal opportunity regardless of race, gender, nationality, and class, by putting the emphasis of assessment on group identities. The implementation of this principle has begun to damage careers, threaten scientists and lower standards in academia. In order to provide a historical perspective, I review how the violation of scientific norms has impacted scientific success in past authoritarian countries, in particular the USSR under Stalin, and Nazi Germany. The comparison with past authoritarian countries does not aim at equating situations from then and now, but can help understand social and political mechanisms of current events. It also highlights in a drastic way consequences that a violation of scientific norms may have for science today.

Research framed around issues of diversity and representation in STEM is often controversial. The question of what constitutes a valid critique of such research, or the appropriate manner of airing such a critique, thus has a heavy ideological and political subtext. Here, we outline an attempt to comment on a paper recently published in the research journal Physical Review – Physics Education Research (PRPER). The article in question claimed to find evidence of ‘whiteness’ in introductory physics from analysis of a six-minute video. We argue that even if one accepts the rather tenuous proposition that ‘whiteness’ is sufficiently well defined to observe, the study lacks the proper controls, checks and methodology to allow for confirmation or disconfirmation of the authors’ interpretation of the data. The authors of the whiteness study, however, make the stunning claim that their study cannot be judged by standards common in science. We summarize our written critique and its fate, along with a brief description of its genesis as a response to an article in which senior officers of the American Physical Society (which publishes PRPER) explained that the appropriate venue for addressing issues with the paper at hand is via normal editorial processes.

In this article, I describe Germany’s Cancel Culture and Limitations of Debate by referring to my own biography and current social-political events.

The politicization of science – the infusion of ideology into the scientific enterprise – threatens the ability of science to serve humanity. Today, the greatest such threat comes from a set of ideological viewpoints collectively referred to as Critical Social Justice (CSJ). This contribution describes how CSJ has detrimentally affected scientific publishing by means of social engineering, censorship, and the suppression of scholarship.

In the philosophy of science, there are multiple concepts trying to answer the question of how scientists ‘know’ things, all circling around the notion of observation, thesis, falsification and corroboration – namely, the usual concepts of scientific practice. However, a whole different question is ‘how does the public know things?’. Understanding the answer to this question is crucial, since (at least in Western democracies) the public is the entity which funds, and through funding directs to a certain extent, the course of science. Here I discuss ‘the knowledge system’, a concept (proposed by the American writer Alex Epstein), which can generally be thought of as the set of institutions and processes which take part in the way the public becomes knowledgeable about certain (scientific) topics. I argue that the ‘knowledge system’ contains two inherent flaws, namely (i) the accumulation of biases; and (ii) strong feedback loops, which are almost unavoidable. I demonstrate these flaws with some examples and show how these flaws can (and already do) lead to policy suggestions that de-facto abolish academic freedom. Finally, I discuss possible ways to overcome – or at least minimize – the effect of these flaws on science and the scientific community.

This is a modest personal attempt to understand the ideology behind the current antiscientific trends in STEM, and more specifically in mathematics. In simplified terms, these trends can be traced back to a growing imbalance between the old ideal of fairness based on individual merit and the increasingly predominant, unrealistic expectations of equality of outcomes in all areas of human activities. I draw on specific examples and various scientific studies to show how these trends undermine the teaching of science in the US and, increasingly, research in STEM disciplines.