Kultura Współczesna (Contemporary Culture) is an academic quarterly jointly published by the Polish Cultural Studies Association and the National Centre for Culture. Appearing regularly since 1993. From the beginning of its existence, the journal’s goal has been to analyse the most recent cultural processes and phenomena in their context – regional, national as well as universal, since reflection in cultural studies cannot be done well without knowledge of global cultural processes. Over the last few years, the themes of particular issues have been selected in open competitions. This guarantees that the editors and the authors that they invite will speak/write about matters that they find to be of most urgent importance to culture today. This special issue, however, followed a different path: the presented articles were selected by the Editorial Board among the journal’s best, most valuable, most read, and most quoted papers of the recent years. We sincerely hope that this English-language issue reaches readers beyond our culture and language area and also beyond the Polish institutional context of cultural studies. With this initiative, the quarterly has come full circle: from facilitating the Polish reception of the international context to presenting both the emerging and well-established achievement of Polish cultural studies to the international reader (Rafał Koschany, Editor-in-Chief).