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Upcoming Issues

Title	Issue Editors	Submission Date	Release Date
'magic'	Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Angelique Nairn	4 Aug. 2023	4 Oct. 2023
'thread'	Christina Chau and Sky Croeser	29 Sep. 2023	29 Nov. 2023
'royals'	Jo Coghlan, Lisa J. Hackett, and Huw Nolan	5 Jan. 2024	13 Mar. 2024
'audio'	Travis Holland, Michelle O’Connor, and David Marshall	16 Feb. 2024	17 Apr. 2024
'porno'	Kelly Jaunzems, Harrison See, and Lelia Green	7 June 2024	7 Aug. 2024
'artificial'	Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Angelique Nairn	27 Sep. 2024	27 Nov. 2024

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'magic'

In his book The History of Magic (2020), Chris Gosden contends that magic is a product of human connection with the universe, offering answers to questions of meaning and reality, and surviving for centuries because of its capacity for constant renewal. Furthermore, magic has been, and continues to be, tied to the activities and beliefs of a myriad of cultural groups, guiding their understandings of, for example, transcendence, transformation, and transactions, cultural, social, political, or otherwise. Yet despite magic accounting for any extraordinary occurrence, both good and bad, magic has often garnered a negative reputation in fairy tales, films, television series, and the like by being used by 'evil' beings seeking to punish and control others or as a corrupting force that can turn good magic users bad. Of course, magic is not limited to the mythic, supernatural, scholarly, and philosophical, and equally captures the talents of illusionists and magicians with their misdirection and ability to challenge peoples' common-sense. Clearly, magic can and does permeate media and culture, and is depicted as both entertaining and dangerous, as shaping world views, and as practiced by a vast array of individuals and groups.

It is against this backdrop that the aim of this issue of M/C Journal is to consider the place of magic in contemporary media and society, to explore how recent media offerings shape our understandings of magic, conjuring and the supernatural, as well as cultural depictions of the everyday.

Possible topics for this issue may include, but are not limited to:

• Representations of magic, in all its forms, in popular narratives (literature, film, television, comics, animation, and beyond)
• Magic as a philosophical and socio-cultural construct
• Magic as identity (including notions of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and beyond)
• Magic and the supernatural
• Magic and the dichotomy of 'good and evil'
• Magic, ritual, memory, and history
• Intersections of magic, ecology, and the environment
• Intersections of magic and witchcraft
• Magic, religion, and mysticism
• Magic and genre (from fantasy to horror and beyond)
• Magic and technology, and technology 'as magic'
• Magic, illusionism, and entertainment
• The magic of the everyday

Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 100-250 words and a brief biography to the issue editors. Abstracts should include the article title and should describe your research question, approach, and argument. Biographies should be about three sentences (maximum 75 words) and should include your institutional affiliation and research interests. Articles should be 3000 words (plus bibliography). All articles will be double-blind refereed and must adhere to MLA style (6th edition).

Details

• Article deadline: 4 Aug. 2023
• Release date: 4 Oct. 2023
• Editors: Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Angelique Nairn

Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to magic@journal.media-culture.org.au.

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'thread'

Craft and textiles artists have long been associated with expressions of protest and activism on issues around gender, patriarchy, ethnicity, and class. The connections of craft and textiles with subversion is partly due to these practices being historically linked to the feminine and domesticity. As professed by Rozsika Parker in The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, “to know the history of embroidery is to know the history of women”, because expectations around art and aesthetics were an expression of patriarchal stratification.

More broadly, beyond embroidery, craft and textiles in the twenty-first century continue to be vehicles for political expression and identity politics beyond gender binaries, albeit in new ways. Perhaps this is partly because, as suggested by Charlotte Gould, “if women artists at the turn of the century have inherited these struggles, their identity is no longer defined simply by a shared female experience”. Contemporary practitioners are communing online to share resources, ideas, and creations with one another, and interweaving these communications with their craft to the point that tools of communication become integral to modes of making. The current global pandemic has, in some cases, increased the potential of craft, textile, and sewing communities that use social media platforms to find new ways to express identity, community, subversion, and mutual aid through their craft. 

This issue is interested in the intersections between craft, digital technologies, and politics in the twenty-first century. Topics and areas of discussion may include but are not limited to:

• Zoom knit-alongs
• Communities and threads online dedicated to makers of craft and textiles
• Queer sewcialists
• Body positive sewing communities
• Attempts to build anti-racist craft communities online
• Stitch n Bitch meetups online
• Sewing communities on social media
• Online DIY craft cultures
• Textiles as an expression of socio-political identities
• Craftivism

Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 100-250 words and a brief biography to the issue editors. Abstracts should include the article title and should describe your research question, approach, and argument. Biographies should be about three sentences (maximum 75 words) and should include your institutional affiliation and research interests. Articles should be 3000 words (plus bibliography). All articles will be double-blind refereed and must adhere to MLA style (6th edition).

Details

• Article deadline: 29 Sep. 2023
• Release date: 29 Nov. 2023
• Editors: Christina Chau and Sky Croeser

Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to thread@journal.media-culture.org.au.

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'royals'

The British monarchy has played a leading role in various ways over the last millennium of world history, and as such has been frequently depicted in popular culture from the plays of Shakespeare to the extensive coverage in popular magazines. The events of the past year have demonstrated how present the British royal family continue to be both in reality and through fictional representations. This issue seeks articles that interrogate aspects of British royalty, whether the actual royal family or fictional versions, contemporary or historical, across all forms of media and popular culture.

This issue of M/C Journal is produced in conjunction with PopCRN (the Popular Culture Network) and will be drawn from papers presented at the virtual symposium ‘Dieu et mon droit (God and my right)’: representations of the British royal family in popular culture, to be held online on Thursday 28 and Friday 29 September 2023. Registration is free for the conference. Please email abstracts for the conference directly to popcrn@une.edu.au by 30 June 2023.

Topics can include, but are not restricted to:

• Shakespearean royals
• The intersections of the private and public lives of royalty
• Love and British royalty
• The rhetorical power of royal themes
• British royals past, present, and future
• Media reporting on the royals
• Royalty and celebrity
• Celebrity royal children
• Royal representations in film and television
• Royal wedding dresses and royal wedding culture
• Royal food and wine
• Royal fashion, then and now
• The powerful Queen in the patriarchal institution
• The working royal
• Representations of royalty and gender
• Royal mistresses (and other lovers)
• Representations of royalty in folktales
• Performing royalty
• The royals in the (former) colonies
• The royals and war
• Royal tourism
• Royals in children’s literature
• Royal conspiracies
• The royals and the British class system
• Consuming royals – buying royal paraphernalia

Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 100-250 words and a brief biography to the issue editors. Abstracts should include the article title and should describe your research question, approach, and argument. Biographies should be about three sentences (maximum 75 words) and should include your institutional affiliation and research interests. Articles should be 3000 words (plus bibliography). All articles will be double-blind refereed and must adhere to MLA style (6th edition).

Details

• Article deadline: 5 Jan. 2024
• Release date: 13 Mar. 2024
• Editors: Jo Coghlan, Lisa J. Hackett, and Huw Nolan

Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to royals@journal.media-culture.org.au.

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'audio'

Sound is a physical phenomenon. It propagates as acoustic waves through space and time via physical media including solids, liquids, and gasses. Humans have spent much of our cultural history producing and replicating sounds. We might call the creation of sounds meant for human hearing by a closely related word: audio. And from audio spring the means of production, chief amongst them for the last 150 years being radio. Radio waves also occur naturally, although human culture tends toward their unnatural conjuring through our technologies.

Audio and radio content production and distribution have transformed in the face of the cultural, technological, and political development of the Internet. Like other media, broadcast radio has converged and submerged with digital technologies and global high-speed transmissions, now divorced from its physical, terrestrial, and local origins. Sitting at the crossroads of radio and participatory media is podcasting (Berry, “Podcasting”; Berry, “Will the IPod Kill the Radio Star?”), a medium through which individuals, groups, and organisations can create and distribute audio storytelling on the Internet. Industries, individuals, and communities continue to grapple with these technologies. The foremost podcast platforms seek to own the distribution channels of audio just as they and others have come to dominate text, video, and visual media online.

We invite submissions to this issue of M/C Journal that investigate and illuminate the transformation of audio in these recent decades. Authors are encouraged to explore responses, emergences, possibilities, and histories that might illuminate where audio content has come from, what it is now, and where it is going.

Possible topics for this issue include, but are not limited to:

• Historical transformations in audio/radio/sound production and their role in the emerging systems
• Case studies of podcast producers, industries, and audiences
• The relationship between audio, radio, and sound
• Local/global audio
• Pedagogies of audio/radio/sound
• Audio and politics
• Audio platforms, emerging or established
• Audiograms and audiographs
• Sonic branding
• Storytelling in audio formats
• Career pathways and possibilities in modern audio environments

Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 100-250 words and a brief biography to the issue editors. Abstracts should include the article title and should describe your research question, approach, and argument. Biographies should be about three sentences (maximum 75 words) and should include your institutional affiliation and research interests. Articles should be 3000 words (plus bibliography). All articles will be double-blind refereed and must adhere to MLA style (6th edition).

Details

• Article deadline: 16 Feb. 2024
• Release date: 17 Apr. 2024
• Editors: Travis Holland, Michelle O’Connor, and David Marshall

Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to audio@journal.media-culture.org.au.

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'porno'

At the crossroads of popular culture and adult sexual content, the porno casualises pornography, rolling off the tongue and slipping neatly into the everyday lives of adolescents and young adults. Although not universally used by teens, ‘porno’, like porn, references the affection and affectation implied by the Australian diminutive. It robs ‘pornography’ of the heavy load placed upon it by health education syllabi, by content classification regimes, by parents, and by law enforcement. The word porno reclaims acceptable aspects of pornography with the aim of presenting it as a casual, non-threatening part of everyday life, enabling those who accept and circulate this reading to be part of the ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’. Who wouldn’t want to align against ‘them’ with a little frisson of autonomy and self-directed exploration of sexual content from the Web, sharing key texts as part of a favourite gaming platform? Does being a fun, oppositional aspect of popular culture mean that porn is nothing to worry about? Or does it mean it’s more insidious than ever: the predatory wolf dressed as a cuddly sheep? Is porn today’s biggest risk to childhood innocence?

This issue of M/C Journal problematises a very contemporary Catch-22: most Australian children have seen pornography before they leave primary school, but adults can’t really talk to them about it, or provide critical commentary upon it, because under-18s are minors, and there are few acceptable adult speaking positions when it comes to talking to kids about porn. We ask:

• What do pornos mean to those deemed too young to consume sexual content?
• How do teens perceive porn? Do they see it as adults do?
• What cultural materials do teens mobilise to formulate their attitudes to porn?
• Do pornos intersect positively with LGBTIQA+ teen culture?
• “Everywhere they say that it’s harmful but they don’t say how” (Spišák). Is it?
• Is the porno a particular feature of the global north?
• Does porn differ from its more serious cousin, pornography?
• Is porn appropriately regulated? (Would age verification measures solve underage access to porn?)
• Is sexting a part of porn culture?
• Do teens learn anything useful from pornos?
• Are parents and politicians always going to worry?

Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 100-250 words and a brief biography to the issue editors. Abstracts should include the article title and should describe your research question, approach, and argument. Biographies should be about three sentences (maximum 75 words) and should include your institutional affiliation and research interests. Articles should be 3000 words (plus bibliography). All articles will be double-blind refereed and must adhere to MLA style (6th edition).

Details

• Article deadline: 7 June 2024
• Release date: 7 Aug. 2024
• Editors: Kelly Jaunzems, Harrison See, and Lelia Green

Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to porno@journal.media-culture.org.au.

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'artificial'

CfP coming soon...

Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 100-250 words and a brief biography to the issue editors. Abstracts should include the article title and should describe your research question, approach, and argument. Biographies should be about three sentences (maximum 75 words) and should include your institutional affiliation and research interests. Articles should be 3000 words (plus bibliography). All articles will be double-blind refereed and must adhere to MLA style (6th edition).

Details

• Article deadline: 27 Sep. 2024
• Release date: 27 Nov. 2024
• Editors: Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Angelique Nairn

Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to artificial@journal.media-culture.org.au.

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