Welcome to this special issue of the Journal of Media Practice, ‘The disrupted Journal of Media Practice’. This special issue—conceptualised, edited and performed collectively by Coventry University’s Centre for Disruptive Media (CDM) and the Disruptive Media Learning Lab (DMLL)—experiments with how media practice, in rethinking research as practice, can also disrupt the way we mediate this research through various formal and informal scholarly forms (including the academic journal). Although media practice as a field and community embraces a plurality of media, the materiality of its scholarly forms of production and communication remain predominantly text-based. With this special issue we wanted to explore how a journal of media practice can extend from a speculative focus on what media practice as research could be, to an exploration of the alternative forms of communication and circulation it could enable.

Three central questions have been posed to frame this special issue:

  • How is media practice disruptive of and re-performing the way we do scholarly communication and education?
  • How can JMP reconfigure (the politics of) its own practice?
  • What should a disruptive ‘journal’ of media practice look / sound / feel like?

Topics of conversation

As part of this openly available special issue we put forward a number of provocations with respect to what a ‘journal of media practice’ should or could be. To provide an alternative to the standard journal article, the guest editors have structured this issue around a selection of conversations which emphasised the evolving and collaborative nature of research. The articles around which these conversations are centred are multimodal, text-based or hybrid; articles, blog posts or books. The conversations openly evolved (from ‘drafts’ to ‘final versions’ and beyond) incorporating peer commentary (via hypothes.is) and (blog) reviews from invited media practitioners and the audience at large.

On this platform you can find (links to) the various articles which make up this special issue, which are framed and brought together by an introduction. The articles on this platform have all been developed as works-in-progress as (part of) a selection of conversations around media practice, which took place from July 1st 2016 until March 2017. During this period, the articles underwent an open peer review procedure to improve them further and to make a selection of the articles that would be included in the online and print version of record of the disrupted Journal of Media Practice, based on their strength, quality and relevance. The designed post-print and open access version of the journal is available on the platform here (coming soon).

Join the Conversation!

Even though this special issue has now been published, the conversations on this platform and indeed the projects themselves will not be finished or closed, they will continue to develop. They will exist in various versions – the post-print open access version on this platform, the online version of record available on the T&F website, the printed journal, etc. – and you will continue to be able to interact with the versions on this platform. As such you are more than welcome to join our conversations around media practice research, which have been set up  around the articles on the platform. The conversations have been structured with the aid of hypothes.is. For more information about how to use hypothes.is and how to add the specific tags we have used to structure our conversations around the articles to this special issue, please see here: https://disruptedjournal.postdigitalcultures.org/2016/06/28/using-hypothes-is/

If you have any questions about this special issue, please contact the editors at cfp@dmll.org.uk

Topics of conversation:

  • Practice-based Methodologies
    What methods are most suited to creative practice as research? How can we more closely align practice as research through methodology?
  • Performative Publishing
    How do the media we use perform their content and vice versa? How we can bring together and align more closely the material form of a publication with its content? What is the agency of our media, and how are we entangled with the media we use?
  • Processual Research
    From iterative publications to evolving scholarship, in what ways can we better emphasise the processual and ongoing nature of scholarship?
  • Politics & Economics
    What kind of inhibitions do the politics and economics of publishing pose to a disruptive media journal? How can alternative forms of publishing form the starting point for a new politics and new social and economic relations?