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Upcoming Issues

Title	Issue Editors	Submission Date	Release Date

'coffee'	Donna Lee Brien and Jill Adams	2 Mar. 2012	2 May 2012
'ecology'	Catherine Simpson and Kate Wright	27 Apr. 2012	27 June 2012
'embody'	Danielle Brady and Neil Ferguson	22 June 2012	22 Aug. 2012
'list'	Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken	17 Aug. 2012	17 Oct. 2012
'marriage'	Jess Cadwallader and Damien Riggs	12 Oct. 2012	12 Dec. 2012

'coffee'

Coffee was extensively cultivated in Yemen by the twelfth century and qawha and cahveh, hot beverages made from roast and ground coffee beans, became popular in the Islamic world over the next 300 years. Commercial production of coffee outside Yemen started in Sri Lanka in the 1660s, Java in the 1700s and Latin America in 1715 and this production is associated with colonial expansion and slavery. Introduced to Europe in the seventeenth century, coffee was described by Robert Burton in the section of his Anatomy of Melancholy devoted to medicines as "an intoxicant, a euphoric, a social and physical stimulant, and a digestive aid". Coffee is now interwoven with our cultural and social habits. Caffeine, found in the leaves and seeds of coffee, is an addictive psychoactive substance that has overcome resistance and disapproval around the world and is now freely available, unregulated, and without licence.

Today, more than 400 billion cups of coffee are consumed each year. Coffee is also an ingredient in a series of iconic dishes such as tiramisu and (with chocolate) makes up the classic mocha mix. Coffee production is widespread in tropical and sub-tropical countries and it is the second largest traded world commodity; second only to oil and petrol. The World Bank estimates that more than 500 million people throughout the world depend on coffee for their livelihoods, with 25 million of that number, coffee farmers. Unfortunately, these farmers typically live and work in substandard conditions and receive only a small percentage of the final price that their coffee is sold for. The majority of coffee farmers are women and they face additional challenges, frequently suffering from abuse, neglect and poverty. They are unable to gain economic, social or political power in either their family's coffee businesses or in their communities. Some farm coffee under slavery or indentured conditions, although Fair Trade regimes offer some lessening of inequalities. A few high-end producers market gourmet sustainable coffee from small-scale, environmentally-aware farming operations.

For many in the West today, coffee is not about production — it is all about consumption, and especially about cafés and the discussions, mingling, meeting and relaxing that occur there. Our gastronomic sophistication is reflected in which coffee, brewing method and café we choose; our fast-paced lifestyle in coffee-to-go; our capitalist orientation in the business opportunities this popularity has offered to small entrepreneurs and multinational franchise chains alike.

Coffee is also represented in many ways in the media — including in advertising, movies, novels, poetry, songs and, of course, cookbooks. There are specialist magazines and other serials dedicated to its production and consumption, and historians and others have written multiple biographies of coffee's place in our world. In 1995, James Sinclair, PNG coffee grower, found that "coffee is surely the beverage of literature. When in my mind's eye I compare coffee with tea and cocoa I see them thus, in literary terms. Tea? Without doubt visions are conjured up of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, complete with sensible shoes, tweed skirt and warm scarf. Cocoa? It has to be A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh. But coffee? I think of Raymond Chandler's world-weary private eye Philip Marlowe, and of the mysterious lady spies of E. Philips Oppenheim. And so many others! All of them worshipped on the altar of coffee".

So ubiquitous is coffee, that as a colour, it features in all its incarnations in fashion, interior design, homewares and other products.

This issue of M/C Journal invites contributors to consider coffee from any angle that makes a contribution to our understanding of coffee and its place in culture and/or media.

Details

Article deadline: 2 Mar. 2012
Release date: 2 May 2012
Editors: Donna Lee Brien and Jill Adams

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

'ecology'

"Contemporary interest in the environment is based on highly mediated representation of its most appealing aspects and today's symbolism is drawn from popular culture" (Bagust).

Ecology is not only a field of study, but a way of thinking, a conceptual mode that emphasises connectivity and conviviality. Donna Haraway has observed that "the world is a knot in motion", and never has this been clearer than the present moment - a time when impending ecological crisis has forced the uncomfortable awareness of our dependence on an unstable environment and climate, possibly undermining the viability of human life. This uncertain ecological future has prompted the emergence of an array of inter-disciplines, new political, intellectual and cultural alignments that seek an understanding of the whole "organism-and-its-environment" (Rose & Robin). Ecology, at heart, is the study of life, and the interactions that sustain and enrich it.

This issue of M/C Journal calls for interdisciplinary and accessible discussions on the topic of 'ecology' from a natural sciences or humanities frame. Papers could engage with the emerging inter-disciplines of the 'ecological humanities', 'ecocinema' or 'ecomedia'. Alternatively, papers may discuss Neil Postman's notion of 'media ecology'. Adopting a scientific framework, this term denotes the study of media as dynamic environments whereby, "new communications technologies may not wipe out earlier ones" as John Naugton argues, but alter the ecosystem so the old ones that do survive are those that are able to adapt. As a result, changes in the communications environment bring about cultural change.

We particularly welcome discussions on the question of what ecology means for the disciplines of media and cultural studies; papers that seek to perform the inter-connected "tasks of [re]situating humans in ecological terms and non-humans in ethical terms" (Plumwood) and attempt to highlight, as Val Plumwood does in her landmark Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, how "anthropocentric perspectives and culture ... make us insensitive to our ecological place in the world".

Details

Article deadline: 27 Apr. 2012
Release date: 27 June 2012
Editors: Catherine Simpson and Kate Wright

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

'embody'

In The Tacit Dimension (1966), Michael Polanyi began his reconsideration of human knowledge from the starting point that 'we can know more than we can tell.' He believed that 'our body is the ultimate instrument of all our external knowing, whether intellectual or practical.' Our own body, he went on to say, 'is the only thing in the world which we normally never experience as an object.'

Living after the so-called cognitive revolution of the late fifties, embodiment might be better expressed as "the entire physical context of cognition, including not just bodily states, but also modality-specific systems [of the brain] and environmental situations" (Barsalou). But to those working in the creative industries, are embodiment and embodied knowledge more than simply an analysis of the brain/body in its environment?

To consider this and other questions the Centre for Research in Entertainment, Arts, Technology Education and Communications (CREATEC) held the "Embodied Knowledges Symposium." at Edith Cowan University in Perth in October 2011. Nearly 50 presentations engaged with the idea of embodied knowledge and what it means to be embodied. Speakers were from all five universities in Perth and from a range of disciplines including media, communications, creative writing, contemporary performance, visual arts, film and video and photomedia.

We invite contributions to this issue of M/C Journal from presenters at the Embodied Knowledges Symposium and further contributions which address this theme directly. We also encourage submissions from a variety of disciplinary areas. Areas of investigation may include, but are not limited, to such questions as:

Does my body tell me what I (can) know?
Can someone else know my embodied knowledge?
What does 'embodied knowledge' mean in a research context?

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: 22 June 2012
Release date: 22 Aug. 2012
Editors: Danielle Brady and Neil Ferguson

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

'list'

Lists are all-pervasive. Lists are part and parcel of how we experience and make sense of the world. According to Umberto Eco, the whole history of creative production can be seen as one that is characterised by an ‘infinity of lists’ comprising, to name a few, visual lists (e.g. sixteenth-century religious paintings, Dutch still life paintings), pragmatic or utilitarian lists (shopping lists, library catalogues, assets in a will), poetic or literary lists (such as in Joyce, for instance), lists of places, lists of things (like the great list of ships in the Iliad), and so on, ad infinitum... As Belknap puts it, ‘the list form is the predominant mode of organizing data relevant to human functioning in the world’.

Simply defined, a list is ‘a formally organized block of information that is composed of a set of members’; what is significant about a list is that it is ‘simultaneously the sum of its parts and the individual parts themselves’ (Belknap). That is to say, like links in a chain, ‘the list joins and separates at the same time’ (Belknap). Importantly, in fulfilling its aim of displaying information, each list has its own internal organising logic or ‘sensible principle’.

A list of lists, Belknap suggests, ‘would include the catalogue, the inventory, the itinerary, and the lexicon’. In accordance with their variation in form, so there is great variation in function: lists have been deployed in many different ways and for varied purposes throughout history: to ‘enumerate, account, remind, memorialize, order’.

This issue of M/C Journal explores lists. Areas of investigation may include, but are not limited to:

Lists and proprietary knowledge (eg. Twitter archive; Facebook Lists; Telstra Sensis copyright dispute)
Lists as ideological or hegemonic instruments of control (e.g. the Domesday Book and other forms of geodemographics and population statistics)
Lists and the accumulation and organisation of knowledge (e.g. Darwin’s notebooks; Linnean taxonomies; 19th century natural sciences)
Lists and biological complexity in the life sciences (e.g. the Human Genome Project)
Lists and the everyday (e.g. Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book; Mass Observation; Georges Perec’s experiments in ‘infra-ordinary’ documentation and listing; Keaggy’s collection of found shopping lists, Milk Eggs Vodka)
The ‘death’ of Internet lists and the rise of the Internet as ‘the Mother of all Lists’ (Eco)
Lists in ordering chaos, and in responding to the infinite or the inexpressible, and in escaping thoughts about death (‘finitude’) as the ultimate limit (e.g. the compilation of ‘bucket lists’ – lists of things you do before you die – in TV series and film, such as The Bucket List)
Social/collaborative lists (e.g. Reddit) and lists in the form of data aggregation systems (e.g. RSS feeds)
Literary lists, including their use as devices or ‘containers’ for producing an infinite list of elements (eg. Borges’s ‘Library of Babel’)

Details

Article deadline: 17 Aug. 2012
Release date: 17 Oct. 2012
Editors: Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken

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

'marriage'

The question of what 'marriage' is, and what it is capable of becoming, has increasingly become a hot topic across many countries. In Australia, a key turning point occurred when the then Howard goverment amended the Marriage Act to explicitly restrict marriage to the union of one legally recognised man to one legally recognised woman (a fact that has significant implications for those whose natally-assigned identity does not accord with their actual identity, as well as 'same-sex' couples). In response to this, and echoing successful (and unsuccessful) movements in other countries, legislation is now being presented to both State and Federal Parliaments seeking to allow same-sex (or 'gay,' in some popular iterations) marriage to be legalised in Australia.

This restriction on, and petition for access to, marriage in Australia highlights something of the polarised nature of debates over marriage in this country. This plays out in many ways across a range of communities, such as when political parties take positions on what marriage is or ought to be - and on whether it is a matter of public morality or individual conscience. In regards to those excluded from marriage, some lobby governments for access to marriage, whilst others critique such lobbying for failing to challenge the privileging of particular kinds of relationships in regards to, for example, the racialised, classed, sexed, sexualised and normalising effects of marriage. And of course some (typically religious) groups lobby governments to maintain marriage as a heterosexual, reproductive institution, the alleged cornerstone of a stable society.

At the same time as these polarising debates go on, weddings and marriages remain sites of intense affective and consumerist investment. Pop culture continues to return to engagements, marriages and weddings, often thereby revealing contemporary anxieties about sex, gender, love, intimacy and relationships. The wedding industry has taken off, with large sums of money spent in producing one 'perfect day'. In the cultural imaginary, marriage remains, at least ideally, a key step in the imagined trajectory of an individual's life.

This issue of M/C Journal seeks to provide a forum for accessible but critical discussions of the current imagining of marriage. Papers might seek to provide an account of the current 'marriage equality' movement in Australia or elsewhere, critical engagements with such movements, discussion of the interplay between the institutional and personal investments in concepts of marriage, discussion of marriage's current form as depicted in filmic, televisual or other texts, discussion of the continuing affective investment in marriage, or any other critical reading of marriage and the debates that surround it in Australia.

Details

Article deadline: 12 Oct. 2012
Release date: 12 Dec. 2012
Editors: Jess Cadwallader and Damien Riggs

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

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