<nettime-ann> CFP: M/C Journal 'cohesion' Issue

[Axel Bruns <a.bruns@qut.edu.au>]

.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 8 Dec. 2009

                          M/C - Media and Culture
                     http://www.media-culture.org.au/
          is calling for contributors to the 'cohesion' issue of

                                M/C Journal
                   http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

M/C Journal is looking for new contributors. Founded in 1998, M/C is a crossover journal between the popular and the academic, and a blind- and peer-reviewed journal. Our Website at http://journal.media-culture.org.au/ provides open access to all past issues. 

To find out how and in what format to contribute your work, visit http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/about/submissions. 

                        Call for Papers: 'cohesion'
                    Edited by Donna Hancox & Jaz Choi 

Cohesion as a term connotes attraction, unity, and commonness amongst discrete entities. Considering cohesion as a concept is timely with the recent rise of network culture, which comes with both small and radical changes in how people connect with, position themselves in relation to, and understand other constituents of society. The need to build bonds between human beings, and to bring together otherwise disparate experiences and aspirations is proving evermore crucial to a sustainable future for the world. But is the current and pervasive understanding of cohesion and its implicit promise of harmony or unity possible, or do we need to look for more nuanced and realistic ways to approach the idea of cohesion?

Anheier et al. have re-imagined Bourdieu's view of the positions individuals inhabit within social spaces as a 'network, or a configuration, of objective relations among positions' (Anheier, et al., 1995).  From this view the merging of individuals or groups into a cohesive whole becomes less important than the coming together, sometimes only briefly, of ideas into a dynamic and complicated matrix. This is not necessarily to question the obvious advantages of a unified society, rather we seek to ask our contributors if there are new ways of approaching cohesion, and what are the implications for the various disciplines.

Similar observations can be made from the technological perspective. Embedded in everyday life, network technologies engender and accentuate multiplicities: multifaceted self-identity, multitasking, and multisensorial experience via multimedia, for example. As we fast transition from the current network era towards that of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), our social and technological systems and practices become modular-like (Choi, et al., 2009), resonating with what Stone calls 'continuous partial attention' (2006). In this environment, it is cohesion that validates a networked entity by giving it a unified form and/or voice amongst its distributed constituents.

In this issue of M/C Journal, we seek a cohesive understanding of cohesion across disciplines on wide-ranging issues such as the meaning of cohesion, how we understand cohesion, and what we can do with our understanding of cohesion.

Please send a 100-word abstract to the editors at cohesion@journal.media-culture.org.au. Articles of 3,000 words in length should be submitted online at http://journal.media-culture.org.au/ and should be prepared in accordance with the M/C Journal style guidelines, available at http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/about/submissions.

Article deadline:     22 Jan. 2010
Issue release date:   24 Mar. 2010

M/C Journal was founded (as "M/C - A Journal of Media and Culture") in 1998 as a place of public intellectualism analysing and critiquing the meeting of media and culture. Contributors are directed to past issues of M/C Journal for examples of style and content, and to the submissions page for comprehensive article submission guidelines. M/C Journal articles are blind peer-reviewed.

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Further M/C Journal issues scheduled for 2010:

'ambient':   article deadline 5 Mar. 2010,    release date 5 May 2010
'deaf':      article deadline 30 Apr. 2010,   release date 30 June 2010
'waste':     article deadline 25 June 2010,   release date 25 Aug. 2010
'pig':       article deadline 20 Aug. 2010,   release date 20 Oct. 2010
'coalition': article deadline 15 Oct. 2010,   release date 15 Dec. 2010 
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M/C - Media and Culture is located at <http://www.media-culture.org.au/>.
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M/C Journal is online at <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/>.
All past issues of M/C Journal on various topics are available there.
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end


                                                     Dr Axel Bruns

--
 General Editor                              editor@media-culture.org.au
 M/C - Media and Culture                http://www.media-culture.org.au/
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