[Air-L] CFP: M/C Journal 'pig' Issue

[Axel Bruns]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 21 June 2010

                          M/C - Media and Culture
                     http://www.media-culture.org.au/
             is calling for contributors to the 'pig' 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: 'pig'
               Edited by Donna Lee Brian and Adele Wessell 

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, the pigs changed the law to read 'Some animals are more equal than others'. From Charlotte's Web to Babe, there are a plethora of contemporary cultural references as well as expressions of their intelligence and worth that would seem to support the pigs' cause. Pigs also give a voice to many aspects of popular culture and feature in fairytales, cartoons, comics, movies and novels. However, simultaneously, the term 'pig; is also synonymous with negative attributes - greed, dirtiness, disarray, brutality and chauvinism. 'Pigs' are also used to name those out of favour police officers, the obese, capitalists and male chauvinists, but also to give expression to the most unlikely events - as in, 'pigs might fly'.

As food, pigs are both for feasts and forbidden, their meat the site of both desire and disgust. Their faces on platters and their feet in pots, they are smoked, roasted, organic, free-ranged, acorn-fed and farmed in the worst of industrial food producing factories. Snuck into dishes during the Inquisition to expose false conversos, pigs are unclean and inedible, rich and fatty/fattening, yet at the same time at the heart of tip-to-tail eating and some of the most expensive and desired of foodie products: heritage and Spanish hams, for instance. They are the other white meat.

This issue of M/C Journal will be organised around responses to these multiple meanings of 'pig'. As editors, we approach this topic from our own joint areas of research interest of food studies and writing, but we are equally interested in the symbolic importance of 'pig' in all current and past culture and media. That is, for example, in pigs as pets and wild pigs, their place in medical innovation - significant research, for instance, is investigating using pigs' hearts for human transplants, since the size and mechanism of an average-sized pig heart is very close to one of ours - in religion, and in the history of pigs in folklore and myth. 

Please send a 100-word abstract to the editors at pig 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:     20 Aug. 2010
Issue release date:   20 Oct. 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 2010/11:

'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
'doubt':     article deadline 21 Jan. 2011,   release date 23 Mar. 2011
'diaspora':  article deadline  4 Mar. 2011,   release date  4 May  2011
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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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end


                                                     Dr Axel Bruns

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