"Often, media studies 
is preoccupied with texts which 
are abstracted from their 
materiality, yet we live in a world which is 
awash with stuff. Here, I want you to focus on 
artefacts rather than texts, on memorable 
objects with which you may reflect on why you 
became interested in studying media in the first place. 
Here, we are tapping into recent work in anthropology 
and sociology which explores how humans map meaning 
onto their possessions, how our belongings often express a 
sense of belonging, and how the exchange of things helps to 
shape our relations with other people in our lives. In this 
tradition, certain objects are seen as telling — that is, they 
yield stories that help us to better understand the people 
around us. When we are asked to show off things that are 
meaningful to us, we engage in a process of self-fashioning — 
we construct and perform our identities through the stuff 
we share (both the objects themselves and the emotional 
baggage they carry for us). So, what kinds of stuff do we 
meaningfully and memorably accumulate as students and 
fans of audiovisual media? How might we trace the ways 
they entered our lives, the roles they play in 
constructing identity, forming relations, and 
managing memory, and the forms of value and 
worth they hold for us? What do they tell 
us more generally about the ways 
larger groups of people have 
experienced media?"