Dear MeCCSA Community

 

We are delighted to have taken on the editorship of Convergence and are particularly honoured to continue the excellent work of Professors Julia Knight and Alexis Weedon who founded the journal in 1995 and, through their dynamic editorial leadership over the past 22 years, have established an entire field of research. 

 

We are taking this opportunity to both reflect on the journal’s history and to adapt and refine the aims and objectives in relation to a period of extraordinary technological and social change. We are doing this in a number of ways: we have refined the aims and scope of the journal; we are publishing a series of highly focused special issues; we are curating our own ‘themed’ issues; we are regularly profiling past issues via our new twitter feed @convergence_NMT and we are offering opportunities to join our editorial team. Current examples of all of these reorientations and opportunities are outlined below.

 

Aims & Scope:

Convergence was set up in 1995 to address the creative, social, political and pedagogical issues raised by the advent of what were then ‘emergent’ new media technologies. 22 years on, we see the intense and ubiquitous integration and absorption of these technologies into almost every aspect of our everyday cultural, social, creative and political lives.

 

With this in mind, we have set out the following mission:

 

Convergence’s aim is to encourage and advance interdisciplinary modes of enquiry into the study of the histories, trajectories, impacts, practices, pleasures and creative potential of contemporary convergent media and allied innovative technologies.

 

Under this new mission, we particularly invite articles that address the following key topics:

• Convergent media: histories, cross-cultural/international contexts, emergent products
  
• Digital creative production (music, television, art, photography, cinema, kinetic media)
  
• Games, gaming and ludic technologies
  
• Digital media distribution
  
• Mobile media/content
  
• Extended Realities (XR) – Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality
  
• Local and global media regulation and infrastructure (e.g. Intellectual Property (IP), censorship, policy, platforms)
  
• Diversity, inclusion and representational politics
  
• New techno-subjects of the anthropocene – Algorithmic, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life
  
• Democratisation of the digital economy: co-production, open access, block chain and cryptocurrency
  
• Distributed data, networked subjects and vulnerable publics
  

 

Current themed issue CFP:

‘From Emergence to Convergence: New critical perspectives, innovative methods and novel approaches to the study of the digital subject’

Publication Date: April 2019

In the context of the ubiquity, the interpenetration of these once emergent technologies, our first themed issue as the journal’s editors sets out to refocus our attention on the contemporary very specific sites of ‘convergence’ – those practices, places, and processes where technologies, cultures and aesthetics merge and coalesce in the creation of new subjects, new experiences, new artefacts and new knowledge. In this issue we will publish work that brings together a corresponding convergence of methods and approaches in the illumination of these new phenomena, their impacts, their effects, and their affects.  

Closing date for abstract submissions: 4pm 29th March 2018.

http://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/CON/From-Emergence-to-Convergence-cfp.pdf

 

Current special issue CFP:

‘Rethinking the distinction between old and new media’

Guest editors: Frederik Lesage (Simon Fraser University, Canada)

and Simone Natale (Loughborough University, UK)

Publication Date: August 2019

This special issue aims to illuminate places, cases, and contexts where distinctions between old and new media break down, and to propose alternative theoretical frameworks that redefine media change and the interaction between different media. Papers are invited that interrogate how changing definitions of old and new media inform the trajectory of specific media as well as their interrelations, moving away from rigid conceptions of oldness and newness to emphasise, instead, the persistent changes that characterise our relationship with media objects and technologies.

Closing date for abstracts: 4pm 31th May 2018.

http://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/CON/Rethinking_the_distinction_between_old_and_new_media.pdf

 

Opportunities to join the Convergence team

We are seeking a book reviews editor. If you are interested in this position, please send a CV and a 500-word statement which outlines why you are suited to this position and provides a short discussion on the range and types of literature that you believe fit with the journals refocus, to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] by 5pm Monday 26^th March 2018.

 

We warmly invite your contributions that support our new vision for the future of this important and influential journal in the following three ways:

• Through the proposal of future special issues (contact the editors directly)
  
• Respond to calls for editorially themed issues and special issues (contact the relevant editors)
  
• Submit individual articles to ‘open’ issues (through the Scholar One submission system)
  

 

We are very much looking forward to receiving your proposals and submissions and are thrilled to be embarking on this inspiring and timely editorial project.

 

Sarah Atkinson & Helen W. Kennedy

Co-Editors Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies