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

[Axel Bruns]

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 at 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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                                                      Dr Axel Bruns

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