Mediascape

Submissions

UCLA's online journal for film, television, and digital media, Mediascape, is now accepting submissions for its next issue. This journal, a place for articles pertaining to visual culture, is peer-reviewed and published bi-annually. In light of the upcoming election for the next President of the United States, the theme for the new issue will be politics and the political in film, television, and digital media. The deadline for submissions for the next issue is the 1st of September 2008.

Features

The "Features" section is seeking articles that consider politics and/or the political within any and all areas of media studies. Submissions may address themes and narratives that pertain to political subject matter, political struggles and/or exchanges that affect the media industry, and/or the politics of on-screen representation.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • The representation of political themes related to issues of individual political agency, transnational governments, special interest groups, post-colonial politics, and racial and sexual politics in film and media
  • The function and efficacy of political narratives in both fiction and non-fiction
  • The relationship between governments and media industries regarding the regulation or support of the production, distribution, and exhibition of film, television and media
  • The use of film, television, and digital media as propaganda, a political weapon, diplomacy, or a form of political expression

To submit a feature article, please email a short bio and a copy of your manuscript in Word format to Mila Zuo at mzuo@ucla.edu. For the purposes of confidentiality during the double blind peer review, please include both your bio and your personal contact information in the accompanying email only, rather than in the Word document. Feature submissions should range from between 15 to 25 manuscript pages.

Features Philosophy:
Taking into account the increasingly blurry line between the many different components of the modern media landscape, the "Features" section takes an inter-disciplinary and inter-media approach to scholarly discourse on the three main facets of contemporary visual culture: film, television and digital media. As such, the section seeks contributions from all areas within media studies, from film theory to moving image archiving, and welcomes contributions from other academic fields, such as history, literature, music, economics, political science, etc., as well as from media practitioners outside of academia altogether.

To submit a feature article, please email a short bio and a copy of your manuscript in Word format to Mila Zuo at mzuo@ucla.edu. For the purposes of confidentiality during the double blind peer review, please include both your bio and your personal contact information in the accompanying email only, rather than in the word document. Feature submissions should range from between 15 to 25 manuscript pages.

Reviews

The "Reviews" section is seeking reviews that interrogate "politics" - either as object of review, or as critical framework. The object of review can be a film, a TV program, a website, an advertisement, a piece of hardware, a movie review, an academic conference, a business practice, a work of media policy - anything. Presidential candidates' websites, videos available online produced by or about the candidates, and media coverage of candidates across various platforms could provide particularly intriguing objects for review considering this issue's theme. Questions that may arise include:
  • What is at stake in political media?
  • What is the direction of political media criticism today?
  • How have fandom and fan communities rewired the possibilities of political media criticism?
  • What is the relationship between aesthetics and politics in an era of intensified media convergence?
  • How have genres (such as comedy) shaped political discourse?
  • How do we "review" political media in a transnational medium such as the web?

Reviews must be original, and creativity (in argumentation and/or style) is encouraged.

Reviews philosophy:
Mainstream film, television and digital media reviewing tends to be constrained by an industry model that requires writers to gain access to the objects of their review through publicity agents, press kits and press screenings, leading to a homogeneity of perspectives, and limiting reviews to objects that are newly available for purchase -- in effect reducing these reviews to simple announcements of the latest releases. This model also limits reviews to the film/TV/digital media text, which essentially gives industrial and business factors a free pass. For these reasons, Mediascape's reviews section calls for reviews written outside of the industry model described above. This means examining not only film, television and digital media texts, but also the institutions and apparatuses that shape the way we as consumers, fans, and academics make meaning of them -- institutions such as festivals, books, award shows, restorations, fan magazines, conferences, DVDs, press kits, movie theaters, peer-to-peer technologies, soundtracks, televisions, advertising, reviews, websites, retailers, or any combination of the above.

Please direct "Reviews" questions, proposals, and submissions to Brian Hu at brianhu@ucla.edu. Reviews should be a minimum of 2,500 words, although exceptions may be granted. There is no maximum word limit, provided work is readable, structured, and visually appealing in the online format.

Columns

The "Columns" section for this issue would like to address not politics and the political, but the impolitic and politically incorrect in film, television and digital media, and we are seeking short papers (800-1500 words) that may or may not address:

  • The effect of impolitic films on society
  • The relationship of impolitic films to reality
  • Impolitic websites, blogging, and online behavior
  • Impolitic journalism and political analysts/analysis
  • Impolitic voting habits
  • Impolitic fashion-sense
  • The rise of the impolitic voter
  • Impolitic parody and satire
  • Impolitic gameplay

Please submit "Columns" questions, proposals, and submissions to Bryan Hartzheim at bhartz@ucla.edu.

Meta

The pursuit of cinema and media scholarship often leaves unexamined questions about the practice of scholarship itself: how we formulate analysis and argument, why certain issues emerge to the fore, what new forms and expressions of media and cultural analysis enhance our understanding. META presents students and scholars of cinema and media the opportunity to publish work that exemplifies scholastic self-awareness-papers and projects that contemplate academic methods, critique their implications and limitations, and propagate new approaches to media scholarship.

With this in mind, META not only seeks papers discussing academic and professional scholarship, but also examples of scholarly work that defy traditional categories of research and publication. We welcome submission of podcasts, online tools, hypertext or Flash experiments, and we also seek new approaches to more conventional forms such as the academic article, essay, and book. Our intention is that these works provide concrete examples of new and intriguing scholarly methods in research and publication that, in turn, will inspire further discussion of the forms and functions of scholarly work.

This issue's theme of politics and the political in film, television and digital media suggests some intriguing questions about scholarship, media and politics. What is the role of media scholarship relative to political discourse? Does scholarship in general (and media scholarship in particular) exhibit a polarizing or marginalizing "liberal" bias? Although another Paris 1968 isn't likely, can filmmakers and media scholars exert a more powerful influence on politics, culture and society than more recent history illustrates? These and many other questions are of particular interest to META for the next issue.

If you have questions about META submissions, or wish to submit a paper or project for consideration, please contact David O'Grady at david@davidogrady.com by September 1, 2008. If your finished project cannot be easily transmitted to Mediascape, please contact our editor as soon as possible to discuss the technical requirements for the project's publication on our website.

General Guidelines:

All submissions should follow MLA Style guidelines, employ endnote citations, and comply with the following formatting requirements:

  1. No cover page, with title instead centered at the top of the first page of the article
  2. Language of document set to English
  3. Double spaced paragraphs in 12 point font
  4. 1" Margins
  5. Endnotes rather than footnotes
  6. Images correctly sized outside of word (sizing them in word slows web editing process) and then placed within the word document's layout where they should appear at publication

Because of the peer review and editorial processes of the journal's different sections, it may take as long as eight weeks for decisions on submissions to reach the writers. General email inquiries can be sent to Jennifer Porst at jenporst@mac.com.

Mediascape Copyright Policy:

Articles appearing in Mediascape are accepted on the basis that the material is the original, uncopied work of the author or authors. The ownership of manuscripts for publication in Mediascape shall reside with the author(s), though Mediascape reserves exclusive first rights of publication. This means that Mediascape alone may publish the article for the first time, and the author(s) may not publish the piece elsewhere for a period of 6 months following initial publication.

Following the 6 month first-rights period, the author will retain full rights and ownership to the material, and will be free to re-publish the manuscript elsewhere, provided that full and appropriate credit for first publication be given to Mediascape. In exchange for retaining author ownership rights post-publication, Mediascape requires that authors not submit their manuscripts simultaneously to other journals/publishers while under consideration for publication in Medisascape.

Note on images: Mediascape uses images by permission of the original creator(s), or under the parameters and protections afforded non-profit, educational use by the principles of Fair Use.


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