*CALL FOR PAPERS*

*TRANSMEDIA EARTH:*

* UNDERSTANDING GLOBAL CONVERGENCE CULTURES*
*Edited by Matthew Freeman and William Proctor*


Today’s convergent media industries readily produce stories across multiple
media, telling the tales of *Batman* across comics, film and television,
inviting audiences to participate in the *Star Wars* universe across
cinema, novels, the Web, and more. This transmedia phenomenon may be a
common strategy in Hollywood’s blockbuster factory, tied up with ideas of
digital marketing and fictional worldbuilding, but transmedia is so much
more than movie franchises based in Anglo-American contexts. As Hay and
Couldry emphasise, ‘international differences are obscured by the
generality of the term of the term “convergence culture”, and it can be
helpful to consider convergence “cultures” in the plural’ (Hay and Couldry,
2011).

While in the US, for instance, we might associate transmedia with
storytelling and the building of franchise fictional worlds like *Batman*
and *Star Wars*, in the European context, transmedia can occupy the role of
a promotion tool for independent filmmakers, or that of a site of
construction for social reality games, or even serve as education or as
political activism (Scolari, 2014). In Canada, transmedia has been used as
a way to enforce religious radicalisation, while in Colombia it is a
powerful tool for re-building local communities and re-making memories.

Different cultures around the world are thus now making alternative uses of
transmedia, re-thinking this phenomenon by applying it to non-fictional
cultural projects as a political and social tool for informing and unifying
communities as well as continuing to develop fictional transmedia
narratives. This book aims to offer an introductory exploration of both
non-fictional and fictional global transmediality by examining how *culture*
(politics, heritage, traditions, leisure, war, and so on) is informing
socio-political forms of transmedia communication and alternative notions
of convergence culture in different countries across the globe.

We invite chapters from scholars researching transmedia from this
‘glocalised,’ cultural perspective. Chapter proposals may address, but are
not limited to:

   - Transmediality as social tradition
   - Transmediality as political communication
   - Transmediality as documentary
   - Transmediality as heritage
   - Transmediality as leisure
   - Transmediality as cultural fiction
   - Transmediality as education

Please send chapter proposals (300 words) along with a short biography to
the book’s editors Dr Matthew Freeman ([log in to unmask]) and Dr
William Proctor ([log in to unmask]) by no later than *31st July
2016*.

We anticipate that completed chapters will be due in January 2017.

This book will be the first publication to emerge from the Transmedia Earth
Network, an interdisciplinary project that aims to investigate the workings
of transmedia within and across national production cultures around the
world. The inaugural conference of the Transmedia Earth Network will be
hosted by EAFIT University, Colombia in 2017. Those interested in being
affiliated with the Network should also contact Dr Matthew Freeman and Dr
William Proctor.


*Dr Matthew Freeman, FHEA*

*Senior Lecturer in Media Communications*
*Director, Media Futures Research Centre*

*CoLA - Digital Academy*

*Bath Spa University*


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