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Upcoming Issues
| Title | Issue Editors | Submission Date | Release Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 'disclose' | Bree Hadley and Rebecca Caines | 23 Oct. 2009 | 16 Dec. 2009 |
| 'cohesion' | Donna Hancox and Jaz Choi | 22 Jan. 2010 | 24 Mar. 2010 |
| 'ambient' | Luke Jaaniste | 5 Mar. 2010 | 5 May 2010 |
| 'deaf' | Liz Ferrier and Donna McDonald | 30 Apr. 2010 | 30 June 2010 |
| 'waste' | Kirsten Seale and Caroline Hamilton | 25 June 2010 | 25 Aug. 2010 |
| 'pig' | Donna Lee Brien and Adele Wessell | 20 Aug. 2010 | 20 Oct. 2010 |
| 'coalition' | Anthony Lambert and Elaine Kelly | 15 Oct. 2010 | 15 Dec. 2010 |
| 'doubt' | Anna Poletti and Johannes Klabbers | 21 Jan. 2011 | 23 Mar. 2011 |
| 'diaspora' | Lynne Pearce and Kath Woodward | 4 Mar. 2011 | 4 May 2011 |
'disclose'
'Disclosure' can be a risky business. The compulsion to 'open up' or 'share' of oneself is an integral part of interpersonal relationships. It is often seen to be the bedrock on which human beings build 'trust', a sense of connectedness or social capital. In the twenty-first century, shifts in social, legal, technological and medical systems have created new opportunities - and, indeed, new obligations - to disclose details of our beliefs, behaviours and bonds with others in a range of different contexts. New forums for disclosure, self-disclosure and self-exposure can bring rewards - social engagement, excitement, new forms of notoriety, and the opportunity for everyone to advocate on behalf of issues close to their heart. But to disclose also has its consequences. The exhilaration that comes with cathartic 'confessions' or 'confidences' can be short-lived. Disclosures seen by some as a welcome 'outing' of a once-concealed 'truth' can be seen by others as 'betrayal', a 'blabbing' about facts best kept hidden, which can lead to 'embarrassment', humiliation, bullying and punishment.In this issue of M/C Journal we seek contributions that consider the risks, pleasures, perils and ethical consequences of disclosure in public and/or private spheres. We ask what motivates people to disclose - or, by contrast, refuse or fail to disclose - details of their lives, be it in face-to-face interactions, online interactions, documentary, 'reality' drama, autobiographical art, community art or other arenas. We investigate the ways in which people, cultural practices and cultural authorities (wittingly or unwittingly) disclosure of themselves in speech, writing, gesture, social interactions or spatial interactions. Whilst disclosure has been linked in popular discourse with values such as authenticity, authority and 'truth', we challenge the contention that disclosure unlocks the door to truth, reading it instead in terms of power, pleasure, risk, responsibility, vulnerability and the performative construction of particular identities and realities. We are interested in the performativity of disclosure, and the tactics that underpin disclosure of secrets, scandals and lies. Disclosure can often go unquestioned and be validated above all else. Ironically, in some cases, closure may result from disclosure, as identity positions grow inflexible and oppressive under the weight of unexamined discourse. We thus also consider how disclosures can be contaminated, perforated, multiplied, re-performed in order to elide becoming a liability. We seek contributions that examine the performance of 'disclosure' - deliberate or accidental, altruistic or malicious, resistant or recuperative - across a range of contemporary cultural practices. What, we ask, are the personal, cultural, political and ethical consequences of disclosure for those who disclose, for those who are the subject of disclosures, and for those who witness disclosures by and/or about others?
Details
- Article deadline: 23 Oct. 2009
- Release date: 16 Dec. 2009
- Editors: Bree Hadley and Rebecca Caines
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to disclose@journal.media-culture.org.au.
'cohesion'
Cohesion as a term connotes attraction, unity, and commonness amongst discrete entities. Considering cohesion as a concept is timely with the recent rise of network culture, which comes with both small and radical changes in how people connect with, position themselves in relation to, and understand other constituents of society. The need to build bonds between human beings, and to bring together otherwise disparate experiences and aspirations is proving evermore crucial to a sustainable future for the world. But is the current and pervasive understanding of cohesion and its implicit promise of harmony or unity possible, or do we need to look for more nuanced and realistic ways to approach the idea of cohesion?
Anheier et al. have re-imagined Bourdieu's view of the positions individuals inhabit within social spaces as a 'network, or a configuration, of objective relations among positions' (Anheier, et al., 1995). From this view the merging of individuals or groups into a cohesive whole becomes less important than the coming together, sometimes only briefly, of ideas into a dynamic and complicated matrix. This is not necessarily to question the obvious advantages of a unified society, rather we seek to ask our contributors if there are new ways of approaching cohesion, and what are the implications for the various disciplines.
Similar observations can be made from the technological perspective. Embedded in everyday life, network technologies engender and accentuate multiplicities: multifaceted self-identity, multitasking, and multisensorial experience via multimedia, for example. As we fast transition from the current network era towards that of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), our social and technological systems and practices become modular-like (Choi, et al., 2009), resonating with what Stone calls 'continuous partial attention' (2006). In this environment, it is cohesion that validates a networked entity by giving it a unified form and/or voice amongst its distributed constituents.
In this issue of M/C Journal, we seek a cohesive understanding of cohesion across disciplines on wide-ranging issues such as the meaning of cohesion, how we understand cohesion, and what we can do with our understanding of cohesion.
Details
- Article deadline:22 Jan. 2010
- Release date: 24 Mar. 2010
- Editors: Donna Hancox and Jaz Choi
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to cohesion@journal.media-culture.org.au.
'ambient'
Ambience is all around us. Wherever we are. Conditioned as we are as being-in-the-world, we are always surrounded. A surrounding that affords meaningful pathways and places of action and thought, that is intelligently geared up with us. The fundamental surroundings might be the earth itself, upon which multiple worlds, spaces, zones, nets, webs, districts, precincts and the like occupy our lives, as we occupy them.
Ambience can be contrasted with salience. What is salient is what is of immediate interest and attention. Before us right now, taken up. Hopefully, dear reader, these words you are reading have particular salience for you. Right now. But when something is taken up in our field of attention and action, there is so much that remains, always already there, in the background, in the periphery, in the ether, in the air. So when Brian Eno famously coined the term 'ambient music' in the 1970s - and triggered off a whole raft of terms like ambient video, ambient art, ambient architecture, ambient tv, ambient media, ambient marketing, ambient journalism, ambient computing, ambient screens, ambient poetics and ambient literature - he was doing something a little odd. Making ambience salient. In his music and in his discourse about it.
Ambience has been palpably in place, since the dawn of time, but as way of talking about the world is helps gear us towards the all-around and how so much of being human is conditioned and affected by our surrounds, in a age when place and place-making has changed in dramatic ways, locally and globally. In this issue, we ask: what ideas and interaction take place in ambience?
Details
- Article deadline: 5 Mar. 2010
- Release date: 5 May 2010
- Editor: Luke Jaaniste
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to ambient@journal.media-culture.org.au.
'deaf'
"Which would you rather be, deaf or blind?" is a common playground game among children as they make their early forays into imagining the lives of people different from them. How do we learn what we know about deafness? Hearing people cannot know what it is like to be deaf, just as deaf people cannot know what it is like to hear ... or can they? How can we tell fresh and authentic stories of deafness that disrupt our familiar patterns of perception? (Fisher Fishkin)
Once upon a time, the word 'deaf' was enough to describe the varying experiences of people who hear substantially less than what is considered to be normal. However today, we are confronted with a plethora of definitions, playing around with upper and lower case, sensitivities of deaf politics, and delicacies of nuance, e.g.: Deaf/deaf. Hard of hearing. Hearing impaired - all labels that attempt to define, corral, and ghettoise 'deaf' into smaller and narrower prescriptions. If you describe yourself as an Australian, you are not immediately challenged to drill down into the genetics and heritage of your disclosed identity. However, if you are deaf, you are called upon to quote statistics from your audiology tests, to describe decibels, to illustrate whether you are a signer or a speaker, to demonstrate your loyalty to the Deaf community or to the hearing world. The complexities and intrusions are immense.
Deaf characters in fiction tend to be used as generic symbols for something else rather than as fully realised expressions of their individual selves. They are rarely allowed to take their place in the story without having to perform a symbolic task such as alienation, in addition to their narrative role. "Deaf history may be characterized as a struggle for Deaf individuals to 'speak' for themselves rather than to be spoken about in medical and educational discourses." (Dirksen & Bauman). "Also, there isn't a large body of literature about the deaf by the deaf." (Henry Kisor) Couser writes that "this should not be surprising, for a number of factors militate against deaf autobiography ... making them unlikely and rare entities." And what about deafness apropos God and spirituality? After all, St John's Gospel exhorts people to "hear the word of God". Does this mean that deaf people are deaf to God?
Some contemporary examples of representations of deafness and deaf people's lives include:
Films of the deaf experience - The Miracle Worker (1962), Children of a Lesser God (1986), Mr Holland's Opus (1994)
Memoirs of deafness that also conjure up memories of listening, e.g. Listening by Hannah Merker
Fiction - Vikram Seth's An Equal Music; TC Boyle's Talk Talk, Frances Itani's Deafening, David Lodge's Deaf Sentence
Documentaries - Sound and Fury (2000)
TV shows (showing representations of cochlear implants) - CSI (Miami and New York), Cold Case, Bones, Law and Order, ER
How can we create stories capable of crossing "the hearing line, that invisible boundary separating deaf and hearing people" (Christopher Krentz. Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth Century American Literature)?
These are not abstract issues, limited to the confines of the curious and the kind. How we explore and test such questions in the 21st century has direct, significant implications for the quality of deaf people's education, employment, income, and health.
Details
- Article deadline: 30 Apr. 2010
- Release date: 30 June 2010
- Editors: Liz Ferrier and Donna McDonald
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to deaf@journal.media-culture.org.au.
'waste'
Walter Benjamin's work eloquently testifies that reading 'the rags, the refuse' reveals much about the constitution of culture. What a culture does not value speaks as much about that culture as what it does value. In any economy that fetishises the commodity and consumption the realm of waste, that which is left over or left behind, is politicised. The politics of waste, however, are problematic. The production and classification of waste is systemic with capitalist modes of production and their social and cultural taxonomies. Consequently, there are compelling reasons for waste to be brought to the fore as a topic for cultural enquiry. It is all the more timely given the environmental dimensions and pressures of waste.
In this issue of M/C Journal we seek contributions that consider the matter and metaphor of waste in diverse cultural contexts. Beyond considerations of waste in terms of trash and refuse we seek to delve into areas of waste overlooked: wasted time, wasted bodies, getting wasted, literal and metaphorical wastelands and dumping grounds.
Details
- Article deadline: 25 June 2010
- Release date: 25 Aug. 2010
- Editors: Kirsten Seale and Caroline Hamilton
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to waste@journal.media-culture.org.au.
'pig'
Call for papers coming soon!
Details
- Article deadline: 20 Aug. 2010
- Release date: 20 Oct. 2010
- Editors: Donna Lee Brien and Adele Wessell
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to pig@journal.media-culture.org.au.
'coalition'
"Birds of a feather (and colour) will flock (and fly) together."
-- Old English Proverb, 1545 (approx)
The notion of the 'coalition' is one normally associated with formalised alliances between political parties. Coalitional affiliations are not limited to mainstream politics, but share a focus on strategy and outcome across the full range of human endeavours. Parties with varying priorities will put to one side their differences in order to focus on overlapping concerns. Thus coalitions come in all shapes and sizes and cross all walks of life: from families, clubs and teams to friendships, churches and sects, from companies and co-operatives to scientific formula, mathematical groupings and multimedia/multi person online gaming environments.
Recent history has revealed cracks in public and political alliances. In Australia for example, November 2007 marked a change in politics and culture that saw the demise of then Prime Minister John Howard and his Coalition government. The coupling of neoliberalism and social conservatism was said to be the hallmark of that government's commitment to 'old Australian values', to severe forms of border control, the refusal of same-sex marriage, scepticism toward climate change, and rapid privatisation policies for public services. The Coalition, it appeared, no longer represented the interests of the public. Likewise 'the coalition of the willing' as a collective American-led force fighting the war-or-terror fell apart in the later stages of the Bush administration, and the 2008 shift in American politics to Barack Obama's presidency was a singular moment of international historical significance.
We ask then, as connections to particular coalitions shift, what new affiliations are formed? And which aspects of older coalitions continue in the midst of change? What do regions, nations and individuals do when the groups they belong to fall apart or lose power? Larger coalitional shifts tell us much about culture, history, law, media, technology and human behaviour. After Australia and the Western world have moved away from supporting the power and policy of previously dominant groups, questions emerge as to the nature and ethics of collectives (of all kinds) as the expression of political, social and personal change.
This issue of M/C Journal seeks to mount a timely critical reflection on the multiple contemporary meanings and uses of 'coalition' and coalitional thinking. How does the notion of coalition inform political practices and powers? How have coalitions changed in recent times? What other (non-political party) coalitions exist and how might they work? How do coalitions inform understandings and expressions of race and whiteness, gender and sexuality, class and poverty, nations and borders? What does it mean to be 'post-coalitional' and how might we map persistence and change in recent political and non-political groupings and collectives? We welcome papers identifying texts and behaviours that exemplify coalition, affiliational thinking or behaviours, coalitional crisis, or the current local/global coalitional and post-coalitional conditions in which people live - from larger contexts of geopolitics through to the micropolitics of everyday practices, pleasures and identifications.
Details
- Article deadline: 15 Oct. 2010
- Release date: 15 Dec. 2010
- Editors: Anthony Lambert and Elaine Kelly
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to coalition@journal.media-culture.org.au.
'doubt'
Call for papers coming soon!
Details
- Article deadline: 21 Jan. 2011
- Release date: 23 Mar. 2011
- Editors: Anna Poletti and Johannes Klabbers
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to doubt@journal.media-culture.org.au.
'diaspora'
This special issue of M/C Journal has its origins in the international conference, 'Glocal Imaginaries: Writing / Migration / Place', that was held at Lancaster University and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, in September 2009. The conference, which attracted abstracts from over two hundred delegates from thirty-five different countries, constituted a unique opportunity to gain an international, cross-disciplinary perspective on the urgent debates concerning mobility, migration and displacement in the early twenty-first century.
Moreover, with its focus on writing practice and textual production, Glocal Imaginaries distinguished itself from a good many other conferences that have taken migration, post-colonialism (in its various guises) and /or g/locality as their themes. In other words, this was a conference that attended to writers, film-makers and artists as actors who create and shape, as well as respond to, the discourse(s) of migration, and whose participants (from across the disciplines and representative of interdisciplinarity) suggested ways of (re)imagining mobility of all kinds in the contemporary world.
Within, and alongside, this general remit of 'writing/migration/place' in a g/localized world, we received a large number of papers focussing on the ways in which diasporas are produced and transformed through traditional broadcasting and new media technologies and practices. For the purposes of the conference, these papers were brought together in a stream entitled 'networked diasporas', and a selection of these papers will constitute the core of this issue of M/C Journal. One of the great achievements of the 'Glocal Imaginaries' conference was that it brought a truly international perspective to bear upon the mobilities of contemporary diasporas and this trans-nationalism is represented in the diversity of papers presented here. Together, these papers may be seen to constitute a 'state-of-the-art' snapshot of how both traditional broadcasting and more recent voices such as that of Al-Jazeera, as well as digital networking, are re-defining the way in which diasporas 'network' in the early twenty-first century.
In addition to the papers selected from the Glocal Imaginaries conference, we invite further submissions which address these themes.
Details
- Article deadline: 4 Mar. 2011
- Release date: 4 May 2011
- Editors: Lynne Pearce and Kath Woodward
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to diaspora@journal.media-culture.org.au.
