Jonah Wilberg, coordinator of the Life Itself Research collective, published a well-received introduction to the different strands within Metamodernism in February 2025.
As I write this in early 2025 Metamodernism is something few people have heard of. A search on Google Trends shows it to be about as popular as a search term as ‘Integral Theory’ and ‘Polycrisis’ - which few people have heard of either.
Yet the word features in the titles of a growing number of academic articles and books. A search on Amazon reveals 29 books on the topic, the vast majority of which were published in the last 5 years.
There’s a mix here of more academic works, like Jason Storm’s Metamodernism: the Future of Theory (2024) and Spencer Jordan’s Metamodernism and the Postdigital in the Contemporary Novel (2024) and those aimed at a more popular audience, like Greg Dember’s Say Hello to Metamodernism (2024) and Lene Anderson’s Metamodernity: Meaning and hope in a complex world (2019).
So, if you’re not one of the few that have heard of it yet: metamodernism is an emerging concept that is both a topic of hard-headed academic research, and thought to be of wide relevance and worthy of popularisation. Potentially interesting, right?
In this post I’ll briefly survey the terrain as it currently stands. While there are a number of other posts and webpages out there introducing metamodernism, I’ve found that they tend to focus on specific strands of thought, while leaving out others.
Read the full post here:
