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Upcoming Issues
| Title | Issue Editors | Submission Date | Release Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 'country' | Andrew Gorman-Murray | 22 Aug. 2008 | 22 Oct. 2008 |
| 'recover' | Henk Huijser and Janine Little | 10 Oct. 2008 | 10 Dec. 2008 |
| 'still' | David Bissell and Gillian Fuller | 16 Jan. 2009 | 11 Mar. 2009 |
| 'enthuse' | Glen Fuller | 6 Mar. 2009 | 6 May 2009 |
'country'
'Country' is a word that is made to do much discursive work.
'Country' is synonymous with 'rural', also evinced through terms like countryside and country-minded. But what is the relationship between 'country' and 'rural'? Are there nuanced differences? Where and how do they overlap? At the same time, 'country' is synonymous with 'nation'. This usage seems to be more emotive than administrative, as in 'my country', 'my land', 'my homeland'. Country evokes something of the connection between people, landscape and belonging as much as any sense of national allegiance. Moreover, country-as-rural and country-as-nation have significant overlaps, especially when the rural is often imagined as the 'heartland' of the modern nation-state - a source of national identity and a storehouse for values lost through the experience of progress and modernity. Here, the country is a traditional material and discursive site for family, community and well-being. From yet another angle, country becomes a genre or style, as in country music, country and western film, country living, country comfort and country cooking. In this way, country becomes a commercial selling point, a commodified imaginary. This commodification is also seen in the recent revaluing of country getaways and retreats, sea-change and tree-change, which in turn invokes the notion of country as a store of traditional values, moral restoration and physical revitalisation.
This issue of M/C Journal seeks submissions which respond to these prompts, exploring aspects of the different, multifaceted and overlapping discourses of 'country', and how these have changed (and continue to change) over time and between places.
Details
- Article deadline: 22 August 2008
- Release date: 22 October 2008
- Editors: Andrew Gorman-Murray
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to country@journal.media-culture.org.au.
'recover'
As 2008 marks the tenth anniversary of M/C Journal, there is opportunity to take stock and reflect on its impact and value. So too, can we revisit its archives and recover some of its best material in rediscovery. Such a process allows for recovery of certain trends and movements that could be said to characterise the preceding decade. While measuring time in ten year blocks is essentially an artificial exercise, it can also be seen as a practical means of stimulating reflection on what has been recovered. This is important to consider at a time when speed is increasingly of the essence in all aspects of life, but especially in media and cultural production, as well as academic production. In such a climate, time to recover is increasingly sparse, with the focus sometimes overwhelmingly on the future. In this context, recovering the past is often only partial recovery: a process of raiding that past for fragments applicable to an imagined future, a recasting of memories in brighter lights. Still, recovering something may give it new life, in different colours or a different wrapping. It may be letting go of the past, understanding, and reconciling the interconnections between private and global landscapes of healing - culturally, physically, spiritually.
We invite submissions that address the process of 'recovery' from a wide variety of angles. This may include, but is certainly not limited to, recovery of cultural artefacts; recovery after prolonged periods of dominant political ideologies; recovery of memory; recovery after war or personal loss; and ultimately, the role of both 'old' and 'new' media in all such processes. Let us recover!
Details
- Article deadline: 10 October 2008
- Release date: 10 December 2008
- Editors: Henk Huijser and Janine Little
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to recover@journal.media-culture.org.au.
'still'
A topology of stillness haunts the space of flows. Against a backdrop of increasing research in mobilities and the mobilisation of forces of all kinds, in this issue of M/C Journal we seek submissions that attend to and reflect upon stillness. 'Still' might be many things: stillness as descriptor of a particular form of action, behaviour or disposition; stillness in an object sense; or still as in an action - to become still. This multiplicity, in turn, prompts many questions. How much effort is required to remain still or keep other bodies, things or ideas still? What might it be to think through 'still' not as a coherent and singular being-in-the-world, but something that is more fluid, diverse, fragmented and splintered? As such, what are some of the various configurations, vocabularies and politics of stillness?
Perhaps this could involve stillness as a strategy, such as to ignore or dissipate the actions of others. In the writings of idlers, or in the actions of those who refuse or cannot move into lives of permanent transit, we can see the actions of still. Here, stillness might emerge as a particular capacity in order to achieve something - where stillness becomes a productive tool rather than apprehended as a weak form of action. Alternatively, there is the still implied by delegation that comes about through trust in objects or various dispositions of delegation. Can we think about still as form of Spinozian pact, or a collective suspension? Stillness might be restorative whereby rest or being still assists with the activities of the day. Is mesmeric, dreamy stillness different from radical stillness? What about stillness that is, paradoxically, active - where it is willed, coerced or designed? What about a more passive stillness that is not willed intentionally by the body? What do these different forms of 'still' do to the body? What do they demand from the body? What are some of the bodily shapes and comportments that are associated with different forms of being or doing 'still'? And since they are not mutually discrete, how are different stills related to each other?
Still in the social sciences has often been a limited antithetical relation with life, animation and ineluctability of perpetual motion: it is the arrest of photography, or the limit of a frame. Perhaps in Walter Benjamin's phrase the 'archaic stillness' of text we see the power of stillness moving through time, but on the whole, still has enduring pejorative associations with passivity, the feminine and notions of negation. In this issue we seek to expand, recuperate and explore further stillness beyond these narrow affiliations. What does an appreciation of still do to our understanding of action and practice? As Paul Harrison claims, perhaps stillness is a necessary and 'intrinsic rather than contingent aspect of activity'. For instance, contemporary networked infrastructures produce subjectivities and ontologies in which the relation of stillness to movement is not binary or negative but fully integrated into the processes, aesthetics and politics of mobility. Stillness in all its forms is more critical in contemporary life, by virtue of and not despite, increased mobility. And yet stillness remains more or less unexplored. In this issue of M/C Journal we ask what, then, is significant about still?
Details
- Article deadline: 16 Jan. 2009
- Release date: 11 Mar. 2009
- Editors: David Bissell and Gillian Fuller
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to still@journal.media-culture.org.au.
'enthuse'
Enthusiasm can be ‘blind’; yet, ‘no great deed can be done’ without it. Tests of ‘competition’, masculine ‘risk’, creative ‘experiment’, and political ‘opportunity’ or ‘struggle’ are all examples of the more general ‘challenge’ that manifests enthusiasm and mobilises bodies into action. Following Tomkins, enthusiasm could also be understood as a complex of affects organised around the activation contour of interest-excitement, but without the ‘normative’ inhibitor of shame. Kant described enthusiasm as an excitation that exceeds the astonishment of novelty. Indeed, the Enlightenment conception of enthusiasm is a subjectively internal mode of the sublime that operated as a kind of motor for perseverance and action that may result in, as Lyotard notes, a challenging ‘historical’ impasse. Yet another dimension of enthusiasm is captured by Moorhouse, who uses ‘enthusiasm’ to describe some sense of the material infrastructure of passion in the subcultural scene of hot rodding and the related motorsport of drag racing. Masculine subculturalists are captivated and mobilised by the socio-technical challenges inculcated by the modified car.
In the post-Fordist era, enthusiasm has become central to mobilising unpaid labour, be it for extracting surplus value from the communicative labour of word-of-mouth viral marketing campaigns to the amateur labour that maintains and services community cultural institutions. Across the spectrum, material and discursive infrastructures of enthusiasm receive investment and become ‘cultural enterprises’. Are audiences no longer cultural dupes simply because they will their own enthusiastic interpellation through participatory subjectivities? Is an enthusiastic cynic possible?
We invite enthusiastic submissions that address the different dimensions of ‘enthuse’ as a process and/or state. This may include, but is certainly not limited to scenes and enthusiasm; historico-political enthusiasms; dysfunctional enthusiasms; popular enthusiasms; charisma/interest/hype as enthusiasm; and enthusiast media and the culture industries.
Details
- Article deadline: 6 Mar. 2009
- Release date: 6 May 2009
- Editor: Glen Fuller
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to enthuse@journal.media-culture.org.au.
