Information For Authors

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Upcoming Issues

Title Issue Editors Submission Date Release Date
'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
'barbie' Jo Coghlan, Lisa J. Hackett, and Huw Nolan 12 Apr. 2024 12 June 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

'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.

'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.

'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.

'barbie'

From the very outset, Barbie was marketed as a ‘Teen-age Fashion Doll’, beginning her long association with fashion. Barbie’s extensive and ever-evolving wardrobe has seen collaborations that led to her celebrating her 50th birthday in a fashion parade of designs from leading designers including Calvin Klein and Vera Wang. Barbie may have started her career as a fashion model, but her CV includes “astronaut, surgeon, Olympic athlete, downhill skier, aerobics instructor, TV news reporter, vet, rock star, doctor, army officer, air force pilot, diplomat, rap musician, president, baseball player, scuba diver, lifeguard, fire-fighter, engineer, dentist, and many more”, and in doing so she has become a role-model for girls, showing them “You Can be Anything”.

The depth of Barbie’s reach into popular culture extends into other forms: animated films, video games, books, and magazines, for example. Since 2001, 42 animated Barbie films have been made, with over US$695 million in revenue from box office, DVD, and merchandise sales. Currently, there are three animated Barbie films on Netflix, with Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse trending in Netflix’s top ten. Over 70 Barbie-themed video games have been released since the 1980s, generating US$14 million in revenue. There are also over 400 fictional Barbie books and magazines in print. In its opening weekend, Barbie (2023) set records as the biggest film opening in the US in 2023, and became the highest-grossing in history of all movies directed by a woman.

This call for papers is seeking articles on the role and impact of Barbie in popular culture, from her inception by Ruth Handler in 1959 to the 2023 film release. We are happy to accept papers on any topic relating to Barbie, but here are some ideas to inspire you:

  • “I want to be a part of the people that make meaning...” – Barbie in popular culture
  • “I begged my mother for a Barbie doll and she said no because I was assigned male at birth” – gender and toys
  • “Some things have been happening that might be related. Cold shower. Falling off my roof. And my heels are on the ground” – Barbie in the real world
  • “Don’t eat!” – the 1960s Barbie diet guidebook and the thinness ideal
  • “I'm here to see my gynaecologist!" – Barbie and the physical and literal representations of genitalia
  • “I’m a liberated man, I know crying’s not weak” – a male doll in a female world
  • “Why didn’t Barbie tell me about patriarchy?” – gender and politics in Barbie
  • “Thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism have been solved” – Barbie and feminism
  • “Barbie has a great day every day, but Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him” – the female and male gaze
  • “KEN IS ME!” – Barbie and the fluidity of identity
  • “Be who you wanna be” – Barbie as inspirational role model
  • “Hey Barbie girl” – people who take on real-life Barbie personas
  • “Life in plastic, it’s so fantastic!” – environmental concerns
  • “She’s black! She’s beautiful! She’s dynamite!” – racial dimensions and tensions
  • “Everyone knows the real Barbie is the blonde, white one” – Barbie as a racial construct
  • “Math class is tough!” – contradictions in Barbie rhetoric
  • “I am not a Barbie doll!” – feminist backlash against Barbie’s construction of womanhood
  • "To be honest, when I found out the patriarchy wasn’t about horses I lost interest" – animals in Barbiesphere
  • “I'm a man with no power, does that make me a Woman?” – gender constructions in Barbie
  • “Barbie for President” – political representations of Barbie
  • “In the dreamhouse” – the architecture of Barbieland
  • “There’s a princess in every girl” – what is Barbie role-modelling?
  • “Barbie is a doctor, and a lawyer, and so much more than that” – Barbie, work, and occupation
  • “Humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever.” – the immortal life of Barbie
  • "Do you guys ever think about dying?" – the mortal life of Barbie
  • "I don’t have anything big planned. Just a giant blowout party with all the Barbies, and planned choreography, and a bespoke song. You should stop by" – music and dance in Barbieland
  • Barbie’s ‘Happy Family’ series – pregnancy and parenthood in Barbieland
  • “Don’t blame me: Blame Mattel; they made the rules” – weird Barbie and projected meanings
  • “I’m a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world” – popular culture responses to Barbie
  • “What was I made for?” – reinterrogating Barbie then and now

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: 12 Apr. 2024
  • Release date: 12 June 2024
  • Editors: Jo Coghlan, Lisa J. Hackett, and Huw Nolan

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

'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.

'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.