Media Studies at the University of Turku was launched in the year 2000 when three subjects at the school of Art Studies - film- and television studies, communication studies and speech communication - were merged together to establish a new and independent department. During the preceding decade, the fields of study have mixed together, and today,the borderlines between original disciplines have blurred, even vanished. Currently Media Studies is a wide umbrella for various research projects aimed to explore, interpret and understand media in its different forms, functions and discourses.

'This collection of working papers, entitled 'Unfolding Media Studies', is a 10-year celebration publication. Working papers may not be the most conventional way to carry out an "in honor of" -book. It offers, however, a many-sided insight into present day Media Studies. The working paper -format implies that the papers published are not actual research articles. Instead, they are mirroring various research projects in their current transformative state. Hence, some papers are more tentative and speculative than others, depending on the authors’ current situations within their projects. As working papers, the texts are also relatively short. The wish is that these papers open up a view to the ongoing research projects, their argumentation, methodology, and materials; the actual results and conclusions are to be published later in academic journals and/or doctoral dissertations.