Introduction to Debates Shrinking the grand narratives in theorizing participation and new media Irena Reifova ´ Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic Jaroslav S ˇ velch Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic This extended Debates section brings together a collection of articles based on papers presented at the symposium ‘Transmedia Generation: On Empowered and Impassioned Audiences in the Age of Media Convergence’, which took place on 18 June 2012 in Prague, Czech Republic. The event was sprinkled with stardust thanks to the participation of Henry Jenkins. In spite of (or rather because of) Jenkins’ appearance, we tried to avoid straightforwardly uniform reverberation of his key thesis about the creative potential of media audiences. On the contrary, the symposium – as well as this Debates section – took the appearance of Jenkins’ paradigmatic figure as an oppor- tunity for sparking a discussion. Not that there is any shortage of it. The study of media audiences’ agency has been fully saturated with polemic. The dispute over audiences’ self-determination as opposed to external structural determination has been long impersonated in the controversy between cultural studies and critical theory/political economy. Reflecting the sociological matrix of the dilemma between structure and agency, mirrored in the dichotomy of ‘structuralism’ and ‘culturalism’ in cultural studies coined by Stuart Hall (1986: 33–48), revived a countless number of times (Kellner, 1995; McGuigan, 1992), and having survived attempts for integration (Babe, 2011), the clash between cultural studies and critical theory still shapes the field and produces an ongoing polemic. Despite the long-lasting exchange, the borderline separating the two paradigmatic camps does not seem to shift – there has been no consensus and neither of the two paradigms has prevailed. It seems that the polemic between cultural studies and critical theory is showing its limits; the disparity of perspectives concentrated on structures on one hand and actors on the other is so vast Corresponding author: Irena Reifova ´, Department of Media Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, Smetanovo Nabrezi 6, Prague 110 01, Czech Republic. Email: reifova@seznam.cz Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 19(3) 261-264 ª The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1354856513482089 con.sagepub.com at Charles University in Prague on September 10, 2015 con.sagepub.com Downloaded from