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Upcoming Issues

Title	Issue Editors	Submission Date	Release Date
'toys'	Tama Leaver, Lelia Green, and Louise Kay	17 Feb. 2023	19 Apr. 2023
'blocks'	Tama Leaver, Lelia Green, and Louise Kay	———	21 June 2023
'wellbeing'	Megan Rose and Vivian Gerrand	9 June 2023	9 Aug. 2023
'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

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'toys'

Toys have a complex relationship with children, childhood, play, and the adult world. They can be constructed as a site of creativity and imagination, inspiring a new generation to explore possible roles, futures, skills, and aspirations. Alternatively, they can be seen as an effective tool for enlisting the next generation as unwitting participants in the consumerist dystopia. Toys increasingly include digital components, sometimes accessing and sharing data online, sometimes taking the form of play that includes accessories and apps. Either way, and at all points in between, toys have a special place in the childhood imaginary and in the hopes and fears of parents and of adults who care for and about children.

This issue is interested in toys as vehicles for future imaginaries, as links with the past, and as receptacles for adults' hopes and fears for their children.

Take, for example, the role of Internet-connected toys. Such toys might be seen as implicated in a range of flows of data and of money that are invisible to the child themself and, often, to the parents. Parents (possibly succumbing to pester power) may buy or engineer the purchase of a toy, which may come with a warranty and a requirement for accepting terms and conditions: all of which serve to gather data about the adult and the child user. In addition to the purchase of the toy, the caregiver is required to provide an Internet service, which represents another cost. Many toys and connected playthings are implicated in other flows of financial interest as vehicles for advertising messages, or in terms of offering higher 'levels' of engagement or game or toy enhancements. Finally, toys may themselves include or suggest further products, commodifying the attention and interest of the child that plays with them.

This issue invites articles that explore constructions of toys that position playthings at the junctions of human experience, imagination, data, information, and monetary flows.

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: 17 Feb. 2023
• Release date: 19 Apr. 2023
• Editors: Tama Leaver, Lelia Green, and Louise Kay

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

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'wellbeing'

This issue of M/C Journal will consider cultures of wellbeing in a context of multisystemic crises that call for an urgent need to re-imagine human futures. Beyond individual survival, what cultures, systems and structures are needed to enable human flourishing at the crossroads of the climate emergency (with its attendant environmental and health crises), an info-demic and growing inequality?

We invite contributors to offer their own definition of wellbeing as part of their submission, including:

• More-than-human wellbeing and critical ecologies
• Care and wellbeing
• Wellbeing and feminist killjoys
• Communities of resistance and wellbeing
• Wellbeing in political contexts, such as Chalmers's 'wellbeing budget'
• Wellbeing as something that is measured or 'quantified'
• Corporatisation of wellbeing as part of workplace cultures

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

• Critical ecologies, the environment
• New materialisms – objects that support resilience
• Wellness cultures
• Online communities
• Economic supports, such as universal basic incomes
• Religion and spirituality
• Arts, cultural formations, and wellbeing
• Community spaces and architectures
• Housing and shelter
• Intimacies, emotions, and touch

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: 9 June 2022
• Release date: 9 Aug. 2022
• Editors: Megan Rose and Vivian Gerrand

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

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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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