Call for Creative Works and Papers

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. How then, can a journal of media practice (JMP) 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?

This special issue— guest edited by the Centre for Disruptive Media and Disruptive Media Learning Lab — will experiment with how media practice, in rethinking research as practice, could also disrupt the way we mediate this research through various formal and informal scholarly forms (including the academic journal).

Three central questions will be posed:

• 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

The aim of this digital only, open access special issue is to 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 will structure this issue around a selection of conversations to emphasise the evolving and collaborative nature of research.

The format and length of the publications or works around which these conversations will be centred will be open to negotiation – they can be multimodal, text-based or hybrid; articles, blog posts or books. The conversations will then be able to openly evolve (from ‘drafts’ to ‘final versions’ and beyond) incorporating peer commentary and reviews from invited media practitioners and the audience at large.

We propose the following topics of conversation, but are also open to other suggestions:

1. Disrupting the journal
   What could a journal of media practice be in a digital environment? What can we learn from best practices?

1. Alternative forms of assessment
   What can we learn from open peer review experiments and alternative forms of assessment in education? Instead of a verdict, how can assessment be shaped around processes of revision?

1. Processual research
   From iterative publications to evolving scholarship, in what ways can we better emphasise the processual and ongoing nature of scholarship?

1. Performative publishing
   How do the media we use perform their content and vice versa? What is the agency of our media, and how are we entangled with the media we use?

1. Education
   What can we learn from experiments in online pedagogy for the way we communicate our research findings?

1. Multimodality and Practice-based Research
   How can we explore criticality with or via different media forms?

1. Politics and 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 new politics and new social and economic relations?

JMP Editors Note

Longer term, the editors are interested in further exploring the legacy of this special edition in terms of a replacement for JMP Screenworks which will no longer be formally supported by JMP, but which will be an archive space for the period it has run.

Expressions of interest / outlines of proposed submissions to guest editors Jonathan Shaw and Janneke Adema by December 11^th 2015 at cfp@dmll.org.uk

Following initial discussions, submissions will be required by the end of February 2016. These will then be developed and explored as online conversations around the experimental platform during March and April 2016.

This experimental issue of JMP will be hosted at https://disruptedjournal.postdigitalcultures.org/