Information For Authors

Interested in submitting to this journal? We recommend that you review the About the Journal page for the journal's section policies, as well as the Author Guidelines. Authors need to register with the journal prior to submitting, or if already registered can simply log in and begin the 5 step process.

Upcoming Issues

Title	Issue Editors	Submission Date	Release Date

'cookbook'	Donna Lee Brien and Adele Wessell	26 Apr. 2013	26 June 2013
'remix'	Andrew Whelan and Katharina Freund	21 June 2013	21 Aug. 2013
'resilient'	Michael Wilson and James Arvanitakis	16 Aug. 2013	16 Oct. 2013
'augment'	Rebecca Caines and Michelle Stewart	11 Oct. 2013	11 Dec. 2013

'cookbook'

Popular interest in all food-related media appears higher than ever, and cookbooks continue to be produced and purchased at an unprecedented rate. Cookbooks have also recently attracted considerable scholarly attention. The study of cookbooks has illuminated broad societal processes and intimate family memories. Their significance has been assessed in literary terms, for what they say about women's lives, the self, society, a particular historic period, national culture and foodmaking knowledge. Cookbooks may not reveal what anyone eats or even how they cook, but they can provide a range of insights into everyday life, domestic and personal aspirations and community relationships. Equally, cookbooks are a wonderful example of material culture; they have historic and social value that make them important components of both institutional and personal collections. The cookbook is also under transformation as the opportunities of new media and self-publishing have expanded the possibilities of their use and value and prompted a rethinking of traditional models.

This issue of M/C Journal seeks to explore the multifarious meanings of cooking literature in contemporary society. Areas of investigation may include, but are not limited to:

Writing, editing and publishing cookbooks
Cookbooks and the media: print, audio, TV, blogs, new and social media, and beyond
Celebrity chefs and their cookbooks
The art of cookbooks: writing, photography, graphics and cartoons, styling
Cookbooks and creative careers
Cookbooks and scholarship
Cookbooks and food heritage
Cookbooks and biography/autobiography
Cookbook as memento
Private and public memory, cultural history and cookbooks
The relationship between cookbooks and cooking
Cookbooks as blueprints for meals
Cookbooks as pedagogy
Cookbooks as activism
Community cookbooks

And questions such as:

What is the future for the cookbook?
What cookbooks are and the different forms they take?
Why they are important?
How they can be used as historical documents and evidence of material culture?
What do they reflect about contemporary attitudes to food and health?

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 refereed and must adhere to MLA style (6th edition).

Details

Article deadline: 26 Apr. 2013
Release date: 26 June 2013
Editors: Donna Lee Brien and Adele Wessell

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

'remix'

From mash-ups to the meme factory, 'remix', originally referring to practices in 1970s dance music, now denotes entire swathes of the everyday cultural landscape. Online environments tend to render local, fannish, and 'amateur' forms of cultural production (frequently drawing on 'Big Content') increasingly visible - sometimes to the apparent detriment of these local forms of creativity. Periodically, the issues involved in adjudicating contested models of ownership and production are highlighted in the courts in terms of copyright infringement. Across audio, televisual, cinematic, textual, and other forms, proprietary models of cultural production now face challenges with respect to controlling and monetising content tailored for mass audiences.

A measure of success for such content is the extent to which it is adapted and re-used by vernacular cultures - sometimes almost immediately. Such re-use, in turn, has been understood both as innovative appropriation and critical intervention in the flow of cultural goods, and as unpaid labour, further raising the value of material that is already ubiquitous in an attention economy sense.

This issue of M/C Journal addresses the range of cultural practices characterised by remix, and the social, cultural, aesthetic, and legal contexts in which they operate. Areas for consideration include, but are not limited to:

Interrogating the boundaries of remix: when did remix 'start'? What of homage, pastiche, and the cover version? How are the boundaries between reference and appropriation established, and to what ends?
Architectures and infrastructures of remix production and distribution: cracked software, Youtube, SoundCloud, peer-to-peer
The norms, aesthetics and interactions of remix communities of practice
Formats, code, and the role of the medium in remix
Fan vidding, trailer mashups, anime music videos, and machinima
Fanfiction, slash and textual innovation
Music sampling, DJ and producer cultures and aesthetics
Retro, revival, nostalgia, and the affect of remix
Remix playbour in the social factory
Originality, plagiarism, derivative work and the ethics of appropriation
Copyright strike, corporate power, and the legal contexts of remix
Fair use, open content licensing and other intellectual property doctrines
Brandalism, copytheft, and cultural activism

Details

Article deadline: 21 June 2013
Release date: 21 Aug. 2013
Editors: Andrew Whelan and Katharina Freund

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

'resilient'

Early psychological discourse on resilience defined the phenomenon largely as an individual trait or set of behaviours, common to especially "resilient" individuals (Garmezy; Rutter; Werner). In contrast, we argue that this standard definition of resilience is ultimately inadequate to account for the range of complex (and common) sociocultural dimensions of resilience and contextualised practices of resilience in people's everyday lives. The word "resilience" has now become synonymous with a community's ability to respond to human induced climate change. While undoubtably an important element in contemporary society, we also aim to interrogate the concept beyond the environmental and consider resilience in different social, cultural and political contexts.

Rather than establishing an oppositional binary of "individual" and "social", this issue of M/C Journal focusses on the dialogical interaction between the individual and the social, so crucial to the formation, accumulation and preservation of resilience. Although the conceptual emphasis of the psychological sciences has been geared towards resilience as an individual phenomenon, it is important to note that this work has provided academics and popular authors with a provocative term in resilience.

Lubchenco highlighted at once simplicity and complexity embedded within the resilience concept, commenting, "Resilience holds the key to our future. It is a deceptively simple idea, but its application has proven elusive" (cited in Walker & Salt). In a related discussion, Ungar asked, "Why keep the term resilience?"

Terms like resilience, even strength, empowerment and health, are a counterpoint to notions of disease and disorder that have made us look at people as glasses half empty rather than half full. Resilience reminds us that children survive and thrive in a myriad of ways, and that understanding the etiology of health is as, or more, important than studying the etiology of disease. (Ungar 91).

In this issue we are seeking contributions which challenge, augment and productively reposition deficit-based models of resilience in individuals, groups or systems as well as associated "vulnerable", "disordered" and "at risk" vocabularies. We are seeking contributions which critically engage with the theme 'resilient' at a variety of social scales, be it at the level of the individual, family, community, society, nation or system.

Areas for consideration include:

Contextualised examples of resilience in the lives of refugees and other war-affected groups.
Everyday examples of resilience in people's domestic spaces.
The formation of resilience 'from a distance', such as in the lives of diasporic or transnational communities.
Commentary on the 'positive psychology' movement and its impact of pedagogy.
Auto-ethnographies of resilience.
Analysis of resilience-related concepts such as hope, affect, belonging, resistance and resourcefulness as well as interactions between them.

And questions such as:

Is resilience too narrow a concept to describe and explain the multiple capacities, strategies and resources required to survive and thrive in today's world?
Is resilience merely the ability to cope with and adapt to adversity? Does it also contain a 'future-orientated' dimension?
In what ways do individuals, groups and systems accumulate resilience?
Is resilience a form of social capital which can be accumulated, exchanged or transferred?

Details

Article deadline: 16 Aug. 2013
Release date: 16 Oct. 2013
Editors: Michael Wilson and James Arvanitakis

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

'augment'

Contemporary lives are increasingly saturated with the promise of technological enhancement — augmentation. Whether medically-enhanced “cyborg” bodies, AR glasses, new surveillance and crowdsourcing tools, locative media on mobile phones and gaming consoles, wearable technologies, or immersive third spaces, augmentation is often entangled in discourses of supplement and improvement. Yet augmentation is also contradictory, the logic of technological perfection co-existing with the perception of weakness or a lack. And so from within this messy space of technologies, bodies and spaces, failure is both generative and productive. Always desiring, we create, enhance, and augment: never satiated, we experiment, refine and repeat. Somatic and spatial practices collide on the promise of something more.

In this issue of M/C Journal, we seek to bring together theorists, practitioners and artists to consider the ways in which augmentation presents itself in the world and in their work. We welcome critical engagement with the philosophical, ethical and cultural implications of the augmented, cyborg and prosthetic body; interrogations of the layered information space of AR, critical reviews of augmented spatial practices; and explorations of the ways in which augmented media intersect with contemporary anxieties around power and statecraft. What is at stake when one engages in augmentation? Who/what pays the price when it falters, miscarries, or backfires? Which actors are engaged — or enrolled — in the practice? Which subjects are left vulnerable? We are particularly interested in cross-disciplinary investigations, mapping the points of connection and disruption in the application, reception and analysis of augmentation. We call upon our colleagues to discuss their forays into landscapes of prosthetics and cameras, Arduinos and QR codes, immersive zones and simulations, all the while collaborating with humans, cyborgs and nonhumans along the way.

Details

Article deadline: 11 Oct. 2013
Release date: 11 Dec. 2013
Editors: Rebecca Caines and Michelle Stewart

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

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