*Media Fields Journal *is excited to announce the call for papers for Issue
#14: *At the Edge*. Please see text below or attached PDF.

Please email submissions to [log in to unmask] by *November
9, 2018.*

For more information and submission guidelines, visit
http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org

*Call for Submissions: At the Edge*

*Media Fields Journal*

*University of California, Santa Barbara*

While researching the Hells Angels in the 1960s, Hunter S. Thompson wrote
“The edge…there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who
know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” Conceiving of the edge
as both a site of orientation and a sharp drop-off, Thompson gestures
towards its dual denotations: as “the line where an object begins or ends”
and “the cutting side of a blade.” Thus, the edge can act both as a form of
speculative orientation that provides boundaries or points of entry, and as
a threshold that offers the possibility of “going over.”

As contemporary media scholarship continues to think through the
proliferation of internet and screen cultures, their edges remain crucial
to a comprehensive understanding. Scholars such as Adrian Mackenzie, Lisa
Parks, and Mel Hogan have explored media technologies at or beyond their
edges, asking how edge environments or experiences might alter their
‘typical’ use. Edward S. Casey writes that edges supply “a species of
*boundaries*, that is, porous edges that take in as well as give out—in
contrast to *borders*, which act to delimit institutions and concrete
practices in the life-world.” Casey’s provocation suggests that studying
media at the fringes or peripheries of society necessitates a discussion of
the edges that construct their marginality. Additionally, edges establish
relationalities between entities through their capacity to connect the
nodes of distributed networks and complex systems. In this way, exploring
media technologies and practices ‘at the edge’ can help locate imagined
horizons and connections that inform the boundaries of identity, community,
and globality.

Explicit academic engagement with the edge has thus far been situated in
sociology, wherein ‘edgework’ came to be known as the study of risk-taking
within recreational contexts. Stephen Lyng describes in the introduction to
*Edgework *how leisure practices centered around risk are paradoxically
treated as a form of individuality and resistance to a neoliberal society
that itself demands economic and social precarity more and more often.
Despite this paradox (or perhaps because of it), both individual and
systemic risk—living on the edge—can be viewed as a means of exploring
broad cultural spaces and their boundaries, such as those between safety
and precarity, inclusion and exclusion, and life and death.

The edge as a heuristic thus brings together scholarly work on mediatized
practices and spaces by examining exactly how their boundaries actively
(re)imagine and (de)construct the dimensions of their existence. In
consideration of the utility of the edge to rethink conceptualizations of
spaces and boundaries, this issue of *Media Fields Journal *explores what
happens ‘at the edge.’ We invite consideration of sites, works, practices,
and systems via the constitution of the edge and its role as a permeable,
although perhaps invisible, entity. We welcome work that attempts to locate
edges, and/or engages with the (potentially traumatic) experience of having
‘gone over.’ We further welcome attention to the sociological methodology
of ‘edgework’ and how it might productively extend to media studies,
perhaps involving industry norms of precarity and the never-ending quest
for production on ‘the cutting edge.’

Dimensions of media ‘at the edge’ might include (but are not limited to):

   - *Cinematic/Televisual Concerns:*Elimination of the visual/sonic edge
   via wider screens, surround sound, 3-D enhancement, etc.; consumption of
   the image in edge spaces; representations of ‘going over the edge.’
   - *Computational Concerns:*Edges and nodes; edges as active and
   mediating sites; the edges of interfaces or platforms such as the Samsung
   Galaxy Edge or Microsoft Edge; imagined digital spaces and boundaries.
   - *Environmental Concerns:*Edges of communities, societies, and/or
   shared identities; mediating territorial edges; ecological impacts of
   edgeless or wireless media; media in edge environments such as data
   centers, server farms, media waste, etc.; edges of technological reach and
   possibility.
   - *Experiential Concerns:*Immersive media: virtual reality, augmented
   reality, and the quest for ‘edgelessness;’ risk-taking individuals and
   practices as a cultural tradition or rebellion; technologies that mediate
   risk experiences; sexual practices of ‘edging.’
   - *Industrial Concerns: *Precarity of media labor and innovation
   practices; economic motivations to produce on ‘the cutting edge;’
   speculative horizons of media.

For any inquiries, please contact issue co-editors Jeremy Moore (
[log in to unmask]) and Nicole Strobel ([log in to unmask]).

----
Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the
University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu