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CFP: Scandalisation across media: New scandal trajectories, temporalities, and actors

October 3, 2025

Scandalisation across media: New scandal trajectories, temporalities, and actors

Nordic Journal of Media Studies

Deadline: January 15, 2026

Nordic Journal of Media Studies invites contributions to the 2027 issue exploring how scandals unfold and are communicated across media.

Editors: 

  • Nete Nørgaard Kristensen (University of Copenhagen): netenk@hum.ku.dk
  • Anne Jerslev (University of Copenhagen): jerslev@hum.ku.dk 

Important dates:

  • Deadline for abstracts: 15 January
  • Deadline for full submissions: 15 August 

Nordic Journal of Media Studies invites contributions to the 2027 issue exploring how scandals unfold and are communicated across media. The issue welcomes international as well as Nordic perspectives and asks the following questions: How have the emergence and development of scandals evolved with the advent of social media, algorithmic amplification, and platform-driven visibility? In what ways do audiences, users, and digital publics engage in the exposure, circulation, and escalation of scandal online? What counts as “scandalous” – and to whom? What are the (social, political, cultural, and personal) consequences of the disclosure of morally dubious and transgressive actions in a networked media landscape? How can scandals be understood as cross-platform and cross-mediated public events today? Can value be attributed to scandal communication and scandals as networked public events? What role do automation and emerging technologies of generative AI play in accelerating or fabricating scandal? How do new technologies complicate questions of responsibility and accountability in scandals and their aftermath? By addressing these questions, this issue offers new insights about the multiple trajectories and shifting temporalities of contemporary scandals, particularly in view of audiences taking on active roles in exposing, co-constructing, and driving scandal.  

Media studies have long conceptualised scandals as the mediated disclosure of what a society considers morally dubious and objectionable (e.g., Lull & Hinerman, 1997). John B. Thompson’s (2000) classical definition stated that “‘scandal’ refers to actions or events involving certain kinds of transgressions which become known to others and are sufficiently serious to elicit a public response”. Occupied with the processes through which moral transgressions were scandalised and with the public reaction to scandal, Ari Adut (2008) similarly regarded scandals as “symbolic centers” that confirm, contest, or reinforce societal values. Scandals used to be extraordinary media events; however, mediatisation, personalisation, and celebritisation have, over the past decades, made, for instance, political, financial, and celebrity scandals the “new normal” (Pollack et al., 2018; Entman, 2012). Tabloid and investigative journalism continue to give prominence to the coverage of transgressive behaviour among celebrities, politicians, CEOs, and so on, but the rise of social media has also challenged the key role played by news media in uncovering, defining, and framing scandal and the scandalous.  

Demarcating and tracing the unfolding of scandals has thus become more complex. Scandals today emerge and progress across media, involve multiple actors, are fuelled and amplified by emotionalised, personalised, and polarised communication online, and unfold intensely for short periods of time with more or less severe consequences for those involved. One might say that mediated scandals – or scandals as (news) media events (Thompson, 2000) – have transitioned into socio-mediated scandals – or scandals as communicative events (Zulli, 2021). Understanding scandals today necessitates analysing their rise and development as more unpredictable processes, as well as recognising the role of (social) media users in co-constructing and circulating the scandalous. At times, these users take on the role of investigating and exposing possible transgressions which may then travel to traditional news media. This challenges clear distinctions between participants and non-participants in scandals and the temporal unfolding of a scandal in relatively linear phases across media, as originally conceptualised by Thomspon (2000). Finally, the altered circuits of communication suggest that scandals may serve as sites for public value negotiation and creation with unifying, empowering, yet also polarising potential, as audiences articulate their worries, interests, and emotions online. As such, scandal communication may be seen as expressions or gestures of concern (Ingraham, 2021).

With this issue of Nordic Journal of Media Studies, we thus invite scholars to explore how to understand processes of scandalisation and scandal communication in an era when social media users play a significant role in co-constructing the scandalous.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Scandals as cross-media events  Visual dimensions of scandal communication
  • Memetic scandal communication
  • Gossip, rumours, and audiences’ scandal communication
  • Humor, irony, and scandal communication
  • Hate speech and scandal communication
  • Scandal and audience engagement in digital niche communities
  • Audience polarisation and scandal communication
  • Audience motivations for engaging in scandal communication
  • Audience engagement and public value  
  • Self-scandalisation as a strategy for audience engagement
  • Methods for studying audiences’ participation in scandal
  • Theoretical perspectives on changing scandal dynamics
  • Historical perspectives on changing scandal dynamics
  • Comparative perspectives on audiences and scandal
  • Nordic perspectives on audiences and scandal
  • Emotion/affect in audiences’ scandal communication  
  • Scandal as a site for changing morals and values
  • Scandal and the culture war 
  • GenAI and scandalisation

References 

Adut, A. (2008). On scandal: Moral disturbances in society, politics and art. Cambridge University Press. 

Entman, R. M. (2012). Scandal and silence: Media responses to presidential misconduct. Polity. 

Ingraham, C. (2021). Gestures of concern. Duke University Press. 

Lull, J., & Hinerman, S. (Eds.). (1997). Media scandals: Morality and desire in the popular culture marketplace. Columbia University Press. 

Pollack, E., Allern, S., Kantola, A., & Ørsten, M. (2018). The new normal: Scandals as a standard feature of political life in Nordic countries. International Journal of Communication, 12, 3087–3108. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/7099 

Thompson, J. B. (2000). Political scandal: Power and visibility in the media age. Polity. 

Zulli, D. (2021). Socio-mediated scandals: Theorizing political scandals in a digital media environment. Communication Theory, 31(4), 862–883. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaa014 

Procedure 

Those with an interest in contributing should write an abstract (max. 750 words) where the main theme (or argument) of the intended article is described. The abstract should contain the preliminary title and five keywords. How the article fits with the overall description of the issue should be mentioned.  

Send your abstract to both editors by 15 January 2026 at the latest

Scholars invited to submit a full manuscript (6,000–8,000 words) will be notified by e-mail after the abstracts have been assessed by the editors. All submissions should be original works and must not be under consideration by other publishers. All submissions are submitted to Similarity Check – a Crossref service utilising iThenticate text comparison software to detect text-recycling or self-plagiarism.

Visit Crossref to learn more about Similarity Check 

 After the initial submission and review process, manuscripts that are accepted for publication must adhere to our guidelines upon final manuscript delivery. You may choose to use our templates to assist you in correctly formatting your manuscript.

Read the instructions for authors and download a manuscript template here 

About Nordic Journal of Media Studies 

Nordic Journal of Media Studies is a peer-reviewed international publication dedicated to media research. The journal is a meeting place for Nordic, European, and global perspectives on media studies. It is a thematic digital-only journal published once a year. The editors stress the importance of innovative and interdisciplinary research, and welcome contributions on both contemporary developments and historical topics.

Read the aims & scope of NJMS 

About the publisher

Nordicom is a centre for Nordic media research at the University of Gothenburg, supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers. Nordicom publishes all works under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence, which allows for non-commercial, non-derivative types of reuse and sharing with proper attribution. All works are published Open Access and are available to read free of charge and without requirement for registration. There are no article processing charges for authors, and authors retain copyright.  

Read Nordicom’s editorial policies 

Visit Creative Commons to learn more about the CC licence 

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Women and True Crime:  Call for Chapter Proposals

March 24, 2025

A new edited collection on true crime in 21st century media (in all its forms) invites proposals for chapters.  The working title is Women and True Crime.

This new book seeks to present original scholarship and its aims are intentionally broad, but hopes to include explorations of women as investigators, activists, perpetrators or victims. For example, when women are producers of true crime media how does the female voice affect the content, structure, themes and consumption of true crime in today’s visual/audio media landscape? 

The collection is not limited to traditional visual and audio media, but wishes include research in digital gaming, social media, all audiences and/or activism that intersects with media. I am also interested in contributions from criminology and law who may wish to discuss the role true crime has in their professional spheres.

It is intended that this collection will not be limited to US/European content. It will be a much stronger discussion if it can include discussions on the global production, reach and/or influences of such media. Therefore, proposals on such topics are welcomed. 

A list of possible media:

  • Documentary styles and aesthetics (including re-enactment, docudrama, podcast investigations)
  • True Crime Literature (incl. fictionalized, graphic, educational, legal)
  • Social media activism, or fan participation
  • Digital gaming or the like

A list of possible structural approaches

  • The social purpose of true crime
  • Positive negative outcomes of true crime media
  • Character creation and/or sensationalist narrative practices including:
  • the presentation of law enforcement, prosecutors, defense teams and/or the legal system in general
  • the presentation of crime victims and their families
  • the presentations of race, gender and sexualities
  • Transmedial and /or transglobal responses to true crime narratives
  • Production practices and ethics
  • Finance, marketing and/or distribution practices and experiences 

The following is a guide to the variety of true crime content the book will consider:

  • Legal Procedures (including police procedural, courtroom practices, appeals, probation services)
  • Injustice Narratives (including false confessions, wrongful imprisonment as well as general criticisms of the American justice system)
  • Organized Crime (history of the mafia, political corruption, gangster celebrities) 
  • Interviews with Convicts (including high profile cases, serial killers)
  • Victims (including support and reconciliation programs)
  • Unsolved crime (including missing persons, ongoing investigations)
  • Crimes made sensational (including property violations, neighbor disputes, traffic stops)

This project is being developed for Routledge (approx. 12 chapters of 6-8,000 words each).

Please send a 300-400 word abstract of your proposed chapter and a 100-word author bio statement by April 30th 2025 to George S. Larke-Walsh at george.larke-walsh@sunderland.ac.uk

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CFP: Participatory Culture, Politics and Reactionary Fandom

February 5, 2025

CFP: Participatory Culture, Politics and Reactionary Fandom


De Paul University, 2 April 2025

Fan practices and behaviours have increasingly moved beyond fan communities into the political, economic, and cultural structures of everyday life. The proliferation of social media platforms has allowed both progressive and reactionary aspects of fandom to significantly shape the public sphere, drawing on similar techniques, pleasures, and practices to interpret the world in a culture where the boundaries between popular and political communication are blurrier than they have ever been. As recent events have highlighted, there is need for more in-depth investigations into the intersection of participatory culture, fan practices, and reactionary politics (Petersen et al., 2023; Stanfill, 2020). 

Ahead of the 2025 SCMS conference, this one-day symposium seeks to explore the synergies, tensions, and conflicts at play in this new cultural terrain. It explores how fan studies can be used to make sense of the seeming growth of conspiracy theory communities and right-wing movements, examine political participation as a form of fandom and play, and how social media can be used to organize against discriminatory cultures or polarization.

We have limited spaces for 20-minute research papers. Please submit titles, 200 word abstracts, and short bios to Bethan Jones (jonesbv5@cardiff.ac.uk) and Simone Driessen (driessen@eshcc.eur.nl) by Monday 2 March. 

The symposium is kindly supported by De Paul University’s College of Communication.

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CFP: Pop Junctions

November 30, 2024

“Toyland. Toyland. Mystic merry Toyland, Once you pass it’s borders, You can never return again” – or so the holiday classic song states. However, this concept has been challenged and defied by consumers of all ages and media conglomerates and franchises are all the happier for it. 

The politics of “play,” as it relates to collecting, nostalgia, and practice is a key undercurrent of media (both traditional and new). From a currently thriving culture of collecting “cute” plush and vinyl in East Asia, to Wizards of the Coasts’ Magic the Gathering (which is owned by Hasbro) constant licensing/ collaborations with other media franchises (Lord of the Rings, The Walking Dead, Jurassic Park etc.), fandoms’ interest in toys allows for an environment of continual expansion, repackaging, and franchising via transmedia.

This theme asks contributors to think about a toy/toys/ toy company and explore how various cultures, groups, audiences, or companies find and make meaning (or money) through such play. The theme is purposefully open-ended, meant to be fun, and pieces will be published on the blog throughout December to coincide with the holiday season.

Length of pieces can vary (750 – 2,500 words). 

Send submissions to lauren.sowa@pepperdine.edu.

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CFP: Youth and Horror: An International Conference

November 30, 2024

Youth and Horror: An International Conference
1-2 July, 2025
University of Birmingham, UK

The Youth and Horror Research Network is delighted to invite submissions for its international conference, taking place in person on 1-2 July, 2025, at the University of Birmingham, UK.

A collaboration between the University of Birmingham and Northumbria University, the Youth and Horror Research Network is an AHRC-funded, interdisciplinary, international network of scholars, educators and cultural partners, which aims to investigate and impact scholarly and public understandings of the relationship between children, youth and the horror genre. The relationship between children and horror has persisted throughout the history of youth culture, from fairy tales and nursery rhymes to the ongoing popularity of Halloween and transmedia franchises like Doctor Who, Goosebumps and Stranger Things. For today’s youth, who are growing up in an age characterised by anxiety and instability, horror has the potential to help them understand the world around them, other people, and themselves. However, the meeting of young people and horror consistently attracts controversy due to unsupported perceptions that the genre is a harmful influence upon children and young people, echoed by an emphasis in scholarly research on ‘negative’ media effects.

The Youth and Horror Research Network therefore aims to encourage renewed scholarly consideration of the benefits, pleasures and risks of youthful interactions with horror, building on foundational work in this area (e.g. by Martin Barker, David Buckingham, Kate Egan) and recent contributions to the field (e.g. by Filipa Antunes, Sarah Cleary, Catherine Lester). We invite submissions for 20-minute papers on topics examining the intersections of horror, youth and childhood, with an inclusive and flexible approach to how any of these terms may be defined, and in relation to a broad range of media (including film, television, video games, online cultures, literature, comics, toys etc.). Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

– Interpretations and/or histories of horror texts addressed to children, or other horror texts which are encountered in youth;

– Intersectional approaches to the relationship between youth, horror, identity and/or monstrosity, e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability, class;

– International perspectives on youth and horror, especially outside of the UK and the US;

– New reflections on media debates and moral panics about youth and horror, e.g. the 1950s Horror Comics Campaign, the 1980s ‘Video Nasty’ scandal, the 1980s Satanic Panic;

– Attitudes of censors and regulators to the issue of youth and horror (including parents as regulators, children as self-regulators, as well as official bodies e.g. BBFC, MPA, Ofcom, local councils);

– Children’s/young people’s fandom of horror, or adult fandom/nostalgia of childhood horror texts;

– Definitions and boundaries of genres, tastes and audiences, and how these are affected by the meeting of youth and horror;

– Cross-media adaptations of texts relating to young people and horror;

– Aesthetics and modes of horror for young people (including, for instance, animation);

– Theoretical approaches to youth and horror, e.g. cognitive, phenomenological/affective, psychoanalytic, behavioural/developmental;

– Archival and memory research on young people’s encounters with horror;

– The roles and uses of horror in education and wellbeing e.g. mental health;

– The role of horror in childhood play;

– Climate crisis as horror and its relationship to youth;

– Horror-related distribution, broadcasting and marketing for children and young people;

– Practice-as-research approaches to youth and horror.

Send 300-word abstracts and 50-word bio to youthandhorror@contacts.bham.ac.uk by the end of Monday 13th January, 2025.

We also welcome submissions for papers or panels presented in non-traditional formats (e.g. video essays and reflections). Please reach out with a speculative enquiry if you have ideas.

We especially encourage submissions from scholars from backgrounds that are typically underrepresented in the academy, and scholars outside of the UK. We have a small number of bursaries to offer to international participants in order to facilitate attendance of postgraduate, independent, and precarious scholars, or scholars who are otherwise without recourse to institutional funds. If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please state this in your submission. Due to funding restrictions, we are sadly only able to offer bursaries to scholars working and residing outside of the UK.

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Call for Chapters for Toyetic Television: A Companion

June 4, 2024

From G. I. Joe workout routines and Sailor Moon wedding gowns to Bratz doll make- unders and Ferby modding, toyetic, merchandise-driven television from past decades has proved remarkably resilient. Toyetic television clearly holds a far greater and more enduring cultural significance than definitions such as “glorified half-hour commercials” (Hilton-Morrow & McMahan 2003, p. 78) might suggest. It is meaningful to individual viewers, it becomes “social lubricants facilitating communication between one child and another” (Steinberg 2012, p. 90), and it can connect generations through shared viewing and playing pleasures. The idea of the program created to sell merchandise has been reversed in cases where the production of a program is funded through the sale of its merchandise, such as The Amazing Digital Circus. The boundary between quality and merchandise-driven television is no longer clear, with even educational programs such as Sesame Street now associated with significant merchandising. One of the aims of this volume, then, is to ask how we might define toyetic television as we move into the second quarter of the millennium. Intended for Peter Lang’s Genre Fiction and Film Companions series, this volume turns a critical eye to the genre of toyetic television and its many transmedia intertexts, exploring the significance and resonance these texts hold for children, adults, and communities. It examines the movement of toyetic texts cross-culturally, intergenerationally, and between media. It analyses texts and audiences, industry and regulators, to uncover the significance of toyetic television to the contemporary moment.

Children’s programming is the most widely internationally traded category of television, while simultaneously being subject to intensely localized regulatory systems. Sesame Street has had numerous localized versions, for example, including Nigeria’s Sesame Square, Mexico’s Plaza Sésamo, and pan-Arabic collaboration Iftah Ya Simsim. When toyetic television moves transculturally, it encounters new reception contexts. Japanese animation Dragon Ball found a devoted fanbase across Latin American, leading to new merchandise such as Argentinian soccer jerseys featuring Dragon Ball characters. A particular focus of research, advocacy, and debate around toyetic television has been concern about potential negative impacts on children from the blurring of boundaries between entertainment and advertising. While it may seem quaint in the current era of toy unboxing YouTube channels, the fear that toyetic television would cause rampant consumerism, rigid perceptions of gender roles, increased American cultural imperialism, and actual acts of violence amongst children was widespread in the 1990s. Those fears are mirrored in recent years by hope that the same toyetic franchises could reflect socially progressive ideas such as body positivity in the remake of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018-2020), queer representation in recent seasons of Power Rangers, and greater racial diversity in last year’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023). Toyetic Television: A Companion moves beyond these good/bad media effects binaries to consider how and what meaning is made with, through, from, and by the various networks surrounding toyetic television and its consumers.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

— Transnational and intercultural approaches to toyetic television
— Gender, race, disability, and sexualities in toyetic television
— Material cultures: Collections, cosplay, and toy modification
— Toyetic television production and consumption in the Global South
— The future of toyetic television in the streaming age
— Remakes and reimaginings
— Nostalgic engagement with toyetic television
— Afterlives of toyetic television in fan fiction and paratextual play
— Video games and digital paratexts
— Theoretical approaches to transmediation, media-mix, and franchising
— Regulation, national or cultural identity, and children’s television
— Educational and psychology approaches to toyetic television
— Music and sound effects in toyetic franchises
— Toyetic media for adults and intergenerational consumption
— Ludic approaches to television
— Fan studies approaches to toyetic television
— Toyesis and toyetics in unexpected places

Finished essays will be approximately 4000 words long (excluding bibliography), should be accessible but touch on the big ideas, and will ideally take a main example as a ‘lens’ to look at the wider topic.

Please send 300 word abstracts and a short biographical note (50-100 words) by August 30th 2024, with a view to having a completed essay by early 2025, to Dr Sophia Staite at: staitepublications@gmail.com

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CFP: Girl Audiences in the ‘Girlscape’

May 10, 2024

Michele Paule (Oxford Brookes) and Sarah Godfrey (UEA) are excited to announce this call for papers for a themed edition of the Participations Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 

CFP: Girl Audiences in the ‘Girlscape’

The term ‘girlscape’ was coined by Tomiko Yoda to describe a ‘mediatic milieu, disseminated via a variety of media channels, linking feminine bodies, affects, objects, and environment’ in which the identificatory figure of the girl is placed ‘at the centre of a consumer culture conceived of as both utopian and egalitarian’ (2017, 173). Yoda develops the theory in terms of Japanese tourism campaigns drawing on wider cultural discourses that position girls as enjoying new freedoms and influence in post-70s Japan. We borrow the term and extend it to consider ways in which girls are increasingly positioned as consuming, agentic, highly visible subjects within contemporary media, and also as ideal prod-users whose online practices sustain platform activity and enjoin the consumption of others. The ‘girlscape’, while encompassing global media elements, will manifest differently in and across different local and national contexts.

If, as Michelle Santiago Cortes (2020) claims, ‘teenage girls rule the internet right now’ they must also navigate the complex conditions and restrictions of this new visibility (Banet-Weiser 2018). Girls’ participatory audience practices draw attention to ways in which algorithmic measures are serving up ever-more tailored and intimate menus for their consumption, while their own activities are consciously shaped through the ‘datafication of affect’ as they work to accrue followers (Bishop 2019; Zhao 2021). The prod-usage of girl audiences and fans enriches the transmedia landscape as they appropriate and remix content that may resist, negotiate with or entirely reproduce hegemonic girlhoods (Hall 1973). At the same time as girl fans’ labour is increasingly important to media platform activity and profitability in economies of attention, girls’ activities as fans and online participants continue to attract derision and hostility (Wilson 2018). The ‘girlscape’, of course, is not limited to digital realms; legacy media including film, young adult (YA) fiction, television, music, and merchandising ‘paratexts’ exist and combine as a part of the proliferation of popular girl-focused media. 

The consumer address to girls of ‘can-do’ Western media feminisms, and the datafication of girl audience economies have been extensively critiqued for their reproduction of middle-class, white, figures and their relegation, exoticisation or elision of non-normative girlhoods. While some corporations have mobilised feminist and inclusive politics in featuring, for example, Black girls, Islamic girls, queer girls and disabled girls in their media output, such ‘naive integration’ (Heiss 2020) has been critiqued for its commodification of feminist politics, its ultimate reinscription of normate bodies, and its reproduction of cultural focus on girls’ appearance. Minoritised girls nonetheless shape their own visibility via alternative media practices such as traditional ‘zines (Reynolds 2020), Twitter signifyin’ (Florini 2014) and counter-narrative podcasts (Greene 2021). This complex and rapidly mutating milieu begs for more empirical research into how girl audiences/readers/users are engaging with the contemporary ‘girlscape’. We therefore invite papers based on original research into any aspect of girl audiences. The following themes are suggestions, but are not restrictive:

  • Girl audiences of specific texts in defined ‘girlscapes’
  • Integrated approaches analysing texts and their production alongside their reception by girls
  • Methodologies for researching girls’ engagements with/in the ‘girlscape’
  • Girls’ participatory media practices/prod-usage
  • The political economies of audiences in the ‘girlscape’
  • The emotional and digital labour of girls/ girl fans online
  • Girls subverting/queering/evading the ‘girlscape’
  • Global/national/local ‘girlscapes’ and their audiences
  • Transmedia engagements in the ‘girlscape’
  • Girls’ engagements with popular feminisms in the ‘girlscape’
  • Girls’ navigation of streaming platforms
  • Girl prod-users on algorithms/ privacy
  • Girls as content creators imagining audiences

Submission Guidelines:

Authors interested in contributing to this special edition are invited to submit original research articles on the Section’s theme. We are happy to receive a range of contributions including creative responses to the theme, although we give priority to essays on actual audience and reception research. We welcome:

  • Empirical audience/reception studies 
  • Essays investigating industry practices/political economies 
  • State-of-the field reviews
  • Reviews of key books/essays
  • Interviews
  • Translations

Manuscripts should adhere to Participations submission guidelines. All submissions will undergo peer-review to ensure academic rigour and relevance. Please note we will adopt Participations’ model of cross-reviewing by others contributing to the Themed Section, and their principle of Open Refereeing, under which the names of authors and referees are known to each other.

Timeline

  • Submission of proposals/abstracts: 1st June 2024
  • Submission of drafts: 1st October 2024 (3 months)
  • Peer Review feedback: 1st December 2024 (2 months)
  • Revised Submissions: 1st February (2 months)
  • From Revised Submissions to confirmation and submission to journal: 1st April (2 months)
  • Publication: May 2025

References

Banet-Weiser, S. 2018. Empowered: Popular feminism and popular misogyny. Duke University Press.

Bishop, S. 2019. Managing visibility on YouTube through algorithmic gossip. New Media and Society, 21 (1112), 2589-2606.

Cortés, Michelle Santiago. 2020. Charli D’Amelio now has more followers than anyone on TikTok. Refinery 29, 27 March. Available at: https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2020/03/9615235/charli-damelio-most-followers-on-tiktok

Florini, Sarah. 2014. ‘ Tweets, tweeps, and signifyin’: Communication and cultural performance on “Black Twitter”. ’, Television & New Media, 15:3, pp. 223–37.

Greene, D. T. 2021. (W) rites of passage: Black girls’ journaling and podcast script writing as counternarratives. Voices from the Middle, 28(4), 38-42.

Hall, Stuart. 1973. Encoding/decoding. In (eds) S. Hall, S., D. Hobson, D., A. Lowe and P. Willis, 2003. Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972-79. Routledge Hall,,pp. 128-138.

Heiss, S., 2011. Locating the bodies of women and disability in definitions of beauty: An analysis of Dove’s campaign for real beauty. Disability Studies Quarterly, 31(1).

Jackson, S., 2021. “A very basic view of feminism”: feminist girls and meanings of (celebrity) feminism. Feminist Media Studies, 21(7), pp.1072-1090.

Reynolds, C., 2020. “My zines, so far, aren’t as political as other works I’ve produced”: Communicative Capitalism Among Queer Feminist Zinesters. Communication, Culture & Critique, 13(1), pp.92-110.

Subramanian, S., 2021. Bahujan girls’ anti-caste activism on TikTok. Feminist Media Studies, 21(1), pp.154-156.

Taylor, Anthea. 2016. Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster. UK: Palgrave MacMillan

Yoda, Tomiko .2017. GIRLSCAPE: The Marketing of Mediatic Ambience in Japan. In M. Steinberg & A. Zahlten (Ed.), Media Theory in Japan (pp. 173-199). New York, USA: Duke University Press.

Wilson, K., 2018. Red pillers, sad puppies, and gamergaters: The state of male privilege in internet fan communities. A companion to media fandom and fan studies, pp.431-445.

Woods, Rachel, and Benjamin Litherland. 2018. “Critical Feminist Hope: The Encounter Of Neoliberalism and Popular Feminism In Wwe 24: Womens Evolution.” Feminist Media Studies 18 (5): 905–922.

Zhao, E. J. 2021. Reconfiguring audience measurement in platform ecologies of video streaming: iQIYI’s pivot toward data-driven fandom and algorithmic metrics. International Journal of Communication, 15, 21.

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CFP: Blockbuster Futures

May 10, 2024

October 28–30, 2024 | Indiana University Cinema | Bloomington, IN

Blockbuster films have been instrumental to the evolution of the art and economics of the film industry for decades. What Charles Acland (2020) calls the “blockbuster strategy”— “the rationale that embraces the big-budget cross-media production at the expense of other industrial and artistic approaches” (8)—underpins contemporary industrial, technological, and aesthetic models of global blockbuster filmmaking. Yet, blockbusters are on the precipice of change, and in the U.S., they are showing their first signs of sustained destabilization. Black Widow and The Eternals (both 2021) were the first two Marvel Cinematic Universe films to fail to make back their costs in theatrical release. Several box-office failures from established franchises landed in 2023, including The Marvels, Shazam: Fury of the Gods, The Flash, Ant-Man and Wasp: Quantumania, and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. That same year, Disney announced a decrease in funding and content development in the Star Wars and Marvel franchises. High-profile film cancellations like Batgirl, Black Adam 2, and Wonder Woman 3, combined with company streaming losses from subscriber plateaus and high-cost-low-return blockbuster franchise TV production, signal a growing caution around the form. Simultaneously, Hollywood continues to depend on international markets as the primary revenue drivers even while global blockbusters are thriving outside of Hollywood’s influence. Indeed, the global success of India’s RRR (2022) and China’s homegrown blockbusters like The Battle at Lake Changjin II (2022) and Moon Man (2022) generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.     

Despite the complexity of these variables and the associated turbulence they engender, it’s clear blockbusters won’t be abandoned by global film industries anytime soon. As we approach the next phase of the blockbuster, this conference is interested and invested in thinking through the past and present of global blockbusters, broadly constructed, to imagine blockbuster futures across medium, industries, geographies, time, business models, genres, forms, and aesthetics.

Encouraged topics can include but are not limited to:

  • Intersections of blockbusters and race, representation, gender, and/or sexuality
  • Blockbusters as sites of transnational flows of financial and cultural capital
  • Blockbusters and geopolitical impacts on cultural creation
  • Blockbusters and postcolonialism/neocolonialism
  • Inclusive film production
  • Technological and aesthetic developments in effects-based filmmaking
  • Permutations in the development, use, and utility of the term “blockbuster”
  • Genre blockbusters/genre and blockbusters
  • Impacts of blockbuster filmmaking on exhibition
  • Indie blockbusters/independent film and blockbuster strategies
  • Blockbusters and streaming
  • Blockbusters and television
  • Intersections of games (electronic and other) and blockbusters
  • Risk in blockbuster filmmaking/financing
  • Work on specific franchises (MCU, DC Cinematic Universe, Fast and Furious franchise, Mission:
    Impossible franchise, etc.)
  • Below-the-line blockbuster labor (including unionization)
  • Blockbuster franchises as star systems
  • Blockbuster aesthetics
  • Queering blockbusters
  • Cripping blockbusters
  • Blockbuster filmmaking as industrial strategy and practice

This conference will serve as the foundation of a special issue of The Journal of Popular Culture focused on blockbuster futures.

Conference submissions are due by JUNE 1, 2024 11:59pm EDT. We strongly encourage practitioners—
filmmakers, programmers, and exhibitors—to participate in the conference to help connect blockbusters to their broader impacts on film ecosystems. Submissions can take the form of preconstituted panels (min of 3 and max of 4 participants) or individual submissions.

Submission Requirements for Preconstituted Panels:

  • panel abstract (1300 min-1500 max characters without spaces)
  • paper abstracts for each presenter (1300 min-1500 max characters without spaces)
  • bio for each presenter (300 min-400 max characters without spaces)
  • 3 keywords that best describe your panel

Submission Requirements for Individual Submissions

  • paper abstract (1300 min-3000 max characters without spaces)
  • presenter bio (300 min-400 max characters without spaces)
  • 3 keywords that best describe your panel

Blockbuster Futures will include a keynote by Robin R. Means Coleman and Novotny Lawrence (editors, The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film, 2024) on race, genre filmmaking, and blockbuster resistance. Additional keynotes to be announced.

Blockbuster Futures includes a pre-conference weekend marathon screening of the Fast and Furious franchise (films 1 through 10: Part 1) on October 26 and 27.

SUBMIT

Questions? Email: bfconf24@iu.edu

Blockbuster Futures Partners is funded in part by a grant from the IU Bloomington Public Arts & Humanities project and is presented in partnership with The Media School at IU Bloomington.

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CFP: The Copy InVisible Culture issue 39

May 10, 2024

Issue 39 – The Copy

Deadline: Submissions due June 30, 2024 to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu.

As a practical and conceptual device, the copy has remained important to many disciplines. Imitation, as Paul Duro describes, has a long global history as it appears in art and visual culture (Duro, 2014). Matters of authenticity, resemblance, and repetition carry multiplicities of meaning across time period and cultural context. The central importance of imitation and/or copying in artistic forms/traditions is only further reflected in contemporary discourse on AI-generated art and theft. In film and media studies, early discourse on mechanical reproduction (Benjamin, 1935) shaped the field of media studies while, much later, digital technology raised questions of whether digital manipulations and remixes destroyed cinema’s status as an indexical medium (Rodowick, 2007). Indeed, the digital turn of the 1990s continues to shape questions of cinema’s reproducibility to this day.

As described by Lev Manovich more than 20 years ago, new media’s ability to cut, assemble, remix, and widely circulate digital information has become central to the way we create, consume, and experience media (Manovich, 2002). We inhabit an era where everything is copyable and manipulable and where the “original” can be increasingly hard to find. From the endless replication of memes, the mimetic performance that structures social media platforms like Tik Tok, to the automated content reproductions and facsimiles populating the gray markets of the content economy; the copy is a central form, act, and function. Copies continue to fuel long standing debates about originality and authenticity, mimicry, and reproducibility. Recent examples include concerns over plagiarism in YouTube video essays and the rise of NFTs as guarantors of authenticity over digital objects.

Of course, copying never required the affordances of digitization, as evidenced by reproductions ranging from earlier Roman copies of Greek statues to the architectural imitation observed within the urban simulacrascapes of China. (Bosker, 2013) Contemporary artists use copying as well, like Yinka Shonibare’s use of symbols and intertextuality to remake Victorian and Edwardian costumes and sculptures in “African” batik fabric. Shonibare’s work challenges imperialism and explores cultural hybridity. It also underlines the need to attend to the copy as a cultural form.

For Issue 39, InVisible Culture asks: What is there to say about the copy today? How do we account for the copy in visual culture, specifically in a contemporary moment where technologies such as AI and digital fabrication have taken such a prominent role in society? As digital media is no longer “new,” does any novelty remain in the digital copy? What does the physical act of copying physical media do/mean differently today? How does the process of imitation/copying continue to shape social dynamics, aesthetics, and politics?

InVisible Culture invites issues that engage with copies/copying as manifested in visual culture, from material reproductions/facsimiles/castings/sculpture to the aesthetics and circulation of digital media. Moreover, we encourage submissions that engage with copying or imitation as it pertains to sociality, whether it be in through “imitation publics on Tik Tok” (Zulli and Zulli, 2022); how online data collection reshapes human subjects as “informational persons” (Koopman, 2019); or what citation does in different cultural contexts (Duro, 2014).

We invite works from the disciplines of film studies, media studies, art history, anthropology, and visual studies on topics that are not limited to but include:
• Digital cinema
• NFTs, authenticity/theft of digital art
• Memes
• Mimesis and mimicry
• Parody and pastiche
• Sculpture
• Social media and mimicry/repetition
• Digital identity/performance/performativity
• Seriality and serial art
• AI-generated art
• Fakes, forgeries, and bootlegs
• Cross-cultural replication
• Representations of race/gender/culture in copies
o Especially gaming and digital media “asset swapping”
• Replica modeling
• The double/doppelganger
• Post indexicality in cinema and photography
• Photographic processes
• Print copy machines, zines

Articles
Please send completed papers (with references following the guidelines from the Chicago Manual of Style) of between 4,000 and 10,000 words to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu by June 30, 2024. Inquiries should be sent to the same address.

Creative/Artistic Works
In addition to written materials, InVisible Culture accepts works in other media (video, photography, drawing, code) that reflect upon the theme as it is outlined above. Please submit creative or artistic works along with an artist statement of no more than two pages to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu. For questions or more details concerning acceptable formats, go to or contact the same address.

Reviews
InVisible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for book, exhibition, and film reviews (600-1,000 words). For this issue we particularly encourage authors to submit reviews of games or other forms of interactive media. To submit a review proposal, go to https://www.invisibleculturejournal.com/contribute or contact invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu.

About the Journal
InVisible Culture: A Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) is a student-run interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year in an open access format. Through double-blind peer-reviewed articles, creative works, and reviews of books, films, and exhibitions, our issues explore changing themes in visual culture. Fostering a global and current dialogue across fields, IVC investigates the power and limits of vision.

Each issue includes peer-reviewed articles, as well as artworks, reviews, and special contributions. The Dialogues section offers timely commentary from an academic visual culture perspective and announcements from the editorial board.

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CFP: Fan Personas

May 9, 2024

Call for Papers
Forthcoming Themed Issues
Fan Personas: Vol. 10, No. 2, 2024

The entanglement of identity and performance within fandoms have been central components of fan studies, whether these fans are focused on sports, music, film, television, literature, celebrity, or something else. Their shared interest and investment in the fan object provide fans with common ground on which to build a collective identity, while the fan object can be a rich source of identity markers, from logos and colour schemes to moral values and philosophical positions. As argued by Busse and Gray in The Handbook of Media Audiences (2011, p. 426), being a member of a fandom facilitates “a particular identity that affects and shapes its members in ways beyond shared media consumption”.

In this issue, we invite scholars to bring understandings of identity from fan studies into conversation with ideas of a strategic performance of self, extending existing work on fan personas from both within the Persona Studies journal and beyond. In doing so, we wish to explore how a ‘fan persona’ might be utilised by fans for specific purposes or in different interactions, or to frame individual perspectives, beliefs or interpretations within collective spaces.

In tandem with Christopher Moore’s (2020) call in Transformative Works and Cultures for a “persona-inflected fan studies”, we are making space in this issue for a fan-inflected persona studies. In clarifying the potentials offered to fan studies scholars by engaging with persona studies, Moore (2020, ¶ 1.9) points to P. David Marshall’s exploration of “the move from representational media (print, film, radio, and television) to presentational media (the internet, social media, and streaming platforms, among many others)”, as well as the concepts of intercommunication, micropublics, and the dimensions of persona (see Marshall, Moore & Barbour 2020). Similarly, research and theorisation around fan objects, names, performances, and communities, and the impact of these on movement between collective and personal identities (see Busse 2017, Chin & Morimoto 2013, Hills 2002, Jenkins 1992, Peyron 2018 among others), can usefully be deployed from fan studies into persona studies.

In this Fan Persona themed issue, we invite both traditional article and creative practice submissions that engage with personas in (and beyond) the following areas:

Mediatised fans
Embodied performances of fandom
Fannish behaviour and practice
Fan communities
Niche fandoms
Mainstream fans
Performing anti-fandom
Intersectional analyses of fans
Materiality and fandom
Fan status
Theorising fan personas
Platforms, infrastructures, and fans
Contested fandoms
Toxic fans/fandoms
Conflicting fandoms
Representing fans
Fan parasociality
Fan investment
Celebrity fandom

Works cited
Busse, K 2017. Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities. University of Iowa Press, Iowa City.

Busse, K & Gray, J 2011. ‘Fan Cultures and Fan Communities’. In The Handbook of Media Audiences (eds A. Sreberny & V. Nightingale), pp. 425-443. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444340525.ch21

Chin, B & Morimoto, LH 2013. ‘Towards a Theory of Transcultural Fandom’. Participations, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 92-108. https://www.participations.org/10-01-07-chin.pdf

Hills, M 2002. Fan Cultures. Routledge, London.

Jenkins, H 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge, New York.

Marshall, PD, Moore, CL & Barbour, K 2020. Persona Studies: An introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ.

Moore, CL 2020. ‘An approach to online fan persona’. Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 33 https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1703

Peyron, D 2018. ‘Fandom Names and Collective Identities in Contemporary Popular Culture.’ In The Future of Fandom Special Issue (eds K Busse & K Hellekson), Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 28. https://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2018.1468

Submission guidelines:
Initial abstracts should be 150-250 words long, with full papers to be between 5000 and 8000 words in length, inclusive of reference list, or an equivalent for creative practice submissions. When submitting for consideration, please identify how your work is responding to the theme of the issue. We encourage scholars to engage with, build upon, and/or challenge existing persona studies scholarship, including (but not limited to) work published in this journal. You can find information about the journal’s focus and scope as well as our peer review policies here: https://ojs.deakin.edu.au/index.php/ps/about.

Submission timeline:
Abstracts (or full papers if available) submitted issue editors

22 July

Author notification and invitation to submit for peer review

2 August

Full submission due for peer review

7 October

Review and revision period

October-November

Issue publication

December 2024

Contact:
For further information or to submit an abstract, please contact issue editors Dr Kim Barbour, University of Adelaide (kim.barbour[at]adelaide.edu.au) and Dr Mark Stewart, University of Waikato (mark.stewart[at]waikato.ac.nz).

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