Introduction

With a second special section on Media and the Police State, we will have run an exceptionally rich collection of essays in Jump Cut on many aspects of policing and the media. Most of these essays were written before the second Trump presidency, and thus have not forseen the hyperbolic manifestations of most of the injustices we now face. However, looking back at the first of these special sections, we can see how the editors' introduction pointed out many of the structural conditions shaping these current fraught relations between power structures, mass media, and forms of resistance. I suggest that those concerned with the multilayered complexities of these relations, and some of the scholarship addressing this topic, look back to the introduction to our first special section on this topic: Media and the police state: Defining the contemporary police state by special section editors, Namrata Rele Sathe and Soumik Pal.

This special section was begin by Soumik Pal and its international richness is due to him. He recruited the essays and also the peer reviewers but had to drop off the project due to illness. We owe him great thanks for the scope of essays here.

We have a new special section on Surveillance and a continuation of our discussion of Turkish dizi. My own editorial is on AI and some possibilities for college teachers' use of it in the near future. I try to keep open avenues for hope. Like many people my anxiety level is high, with the near future grim in the United States. But I also keep my sights on working for a somewhat more distant but equally urgent future, saving the earth. My interest in AI is not only about coping with its entry into our daily life but also a sense that it could contribute an increased rationality to the body politic, a rationality that could be utilized ecologically. That too is a fight yet to be fought.

The next issue of Jump Cut will be our fiftieth anniversary issue. Several special sections are already lined up. Thanks for your support all these years.

-- Julia Lesage