Please circulate the call for submission for Media Fields Issue 9 on the
theme of "Spaces of Protests".

CFP: Media Fields Journal Issue 9 – Spaces of Protest

Submission Deadline: July 18, 2014

“Insurrectional experiences have taught us how unimaginable things can very
quickly enter into the field of possibilities.” In the time that has
elapsed since Jacques Rancière uttered these prescient words in a 2011
interview, their validity has been repeatedly confirmed. From the Arab
Spring to Occupy Wall Street and from Cairo’s Tahrir Square to Istanbul’s
Gezi Park, creative struggles and imaginative demonstrations have
organically emerged from masses of people who had hitherto been considered
passive, apathetic, or without agency. These collective movements, these
sparks of revolutionary fire, have done much more than simply demonstrate
an underlying discontent. They have also challenged the basic framework
through which we interpret our surroundings, making visible the invisible
and possible the impossible.

 In this issue of Media Fields, we are exploring practices of protest as
they relate to space and media. How are activists appropriating spaces and
reclaiming the commons? How are they using technology and media, new and
old, to intervene in relations of power and oppression, production and
control? How are these activities challenging our understanding of culture
and identity and reconfiguring our notion of the sensible? Or by contrast,
following Ranajit Guha’s suggestion, how might we reconstitute insurgent
politics by reading hegemony in reverse—uncovering how protest is
officially rendered as ineffectual, criminal or invisible? How might media
scholars locate alternative traditions of political mobilization? How do
revised notions of materialist agencies help us grasp the complex
assemblages mobilized when protests occur that include media, meaning and
actants? What is the continued relevance of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and
film and media theory in light of contemporary developments? How do we need
to rework our theoretical approaches to accommodate contemporary
circumstances and contingencies?

 We welcome paper submissions dealing with all of these issues. Submissions
may address a specific site or practice of protest, or they may take a
broader view, dealing theoretically with the newly emerging constellations
of solidarity and radical geographic/spatial imaginaries. We also invite
submissions that excavate divergent and alternative emphases and practices
as they relate broadly to media and protest. Consequently we welcome
submissions that suggest new theoretical approaches to these themes as well
as ones that reimagine (or imagine anew) theories of political engagement,
change, and revolution.

 Essay submissions are typically 1500-2500 words. We also invite proposals
for scholarly or critical engagements in atypical formats such as
interviews, art, or photography. We encourage approaches to this topic from
scholars in cinema and media studies, anthropology, architecture, art and
art history, communication, cultural studies, ecology, geography,
literature, musicology, sociology, and other relevant fields. Email
submissions, proposals, and inquiries to Issue Editors Greg Burris and
Alston D’Silva at [log in to unmask] The deadline for full
submissions is July 18, 2014. For previous issues of the journal, past
submissions and submission guidelines visit www.mediafieldsjournal.org.

Submissions may look at a variety of topics including:


   -

   Theorizations and contextualizations of specific practices of protest.
   -

   Comparative approaches between different sites of protest.
   -

   The place of Marxist, post-Marxist, and neo-Marxist approaches to
   revolution, change, and protests and their critiques.
   -

   Interventions and discursive practices within the public sphere,
   alternative publics and counterpublics. Queer and/or feminist theoretical
   interventions into neoliberalism and the Habermasian conception of public
   sphere.
   -

   The status of film and media theory in the aftermath of protests and
   revolution (Occupy, Protests of ‘68).
   -

   Examinations of protests and rebellions in relation to contemporary
   radical thought including Alain Badiou’s notion of the Event, Jacques
   Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, or Slavoj Žižek’s Act.
   -

   Examinations of protests and protest movements via system theory,
   material and social assemblages or actor-network theory.
   -

   Anticolonial movements and indigenous resistance, past and present,
   against cultural hegemony, appropriation and genocide.
   -

   Representations of protest in film, television, and new media.
   -

   Examinations of the ways in which practices of protest constitute and/or
   disrupt categories of gender, sexuality, or nationality.
   -

   Responses to corporate surveillance and dataveillance.
   -

   Discussions of hacking, countersurveillance, and culture jamming as well
   as responses to and condition of media blackouts, censorship and other
   government control over media and communication.
   -

   Practices of solidarity, coalition-building in and across spaces,
   identities, and movements (for instance, BDS). Or conversely examinations
   of practices undercutting solidarity, such as appropriation and
   strikebreaking.
   -

   Media access and the digital divide in relation to protests and social
   movements.

----
To sign off Screen-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF Screen-L
in the message.  Problems?  Contact [log in to unmask]