Synaesthesia: Communication Across Cultures is an open-access interdisciplinary journal, rigorously peer-reviewed and oriented toward advancing new perspectives and understandings of how thought, engagement, and the communication of meanings hinge upon human perception. The journal encourages new dialogues in communication theory and research by publishing original scholarship that explores issues from the interpersonal to mass-marketed, regional to global, academic to corporate, among genders and across time. The journal welcomes innovative theoretical essays and research articles from scholars around the world and aims to advance the progressive exchange of ideas.

Synaesthesia managing editors Dr. Christopher Melley and Dr. Daniel Broudy are pleased to announce that this special edition of the journal will be co-edited by Dr. Jeffery Klaehn (editor of The Political Economy of Media and Power, 2010).

Synaesthesia invites submissions for a special upcoming edition of the journal (Vol. 2, No. 2) specifically focused on ‘The Right to Know in the Age of Surveillance’ — authors may focus on issues and topics relating to ways in which perceptions or established meanings of ‘knowing’, ‘speaking,’ and ‘living in a free society’ clash or align with conventional wisdom, common practice, and/or institutions of power.

Possible themes/topics to be explored (in no way exhaustive) include:

(a) how are digital communication technologies (such as the Internet) used as political, cultural, economic, military, or hegemonic tools to broaden, maintain, or curb free speech or free inquiry?

(b) how are these tools used to embody or express a political, cultural, military, economic, or hegemonic agenda?

(c) what are the underlying, un-stated aims of those people or institutions that seek to redefine ‘knowing’ or ‘inquiring’ or ‘feeling secure in one’s right to privacy’?

(d) what are the prevailing surveillance practices and their effects on the individual, on society, on perceptions of freedom and privacy?

(e) what is significant about the language used by the powerful to enforce these practices?

(f) what are some significant unintended effects of limiting or maintaining the right to know, to inquire, to surveil?

(g) how is belief in the right to surveil asserted or negotiated socially?

(h) in what way does economics reproduce the desire maintain the perceived right to surveil?

(i) what are the gendered and racialized consequences of surveillance?

(j) how does surveillance work interpersonally, socially, marking those as members of the in-group and those of the out-group?

Scholarly work accepted for publication in the online journal will receive subsequent consideration for publication of future collected volumes.

The editors seek articles, essays, reviews or photo journalistic work rigorous in scholarship yet accessible in style for audiences somewhat wider than highly trained specialists in areas of communication, sociology, media studies, discourse analysis, semiotics, rhetoric, education, the visual arts, or literature.

Submissions lodged by e-mail should include a title, abstract, author's name, and institutional affiliation. Including in the subject line of your e-mail submission the proposed title of your essay/paper will help us parse spam from legitimate inquiries. Manuscripts attached to e-mail submissions should be saved in the MSWord .doc format.

Deadline for submissions: 31 May 2014