[Air-L] CFP: Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media Graduate Student Special Issue - Old Against New, or a Coming of Age? Rethinking Broadcasting in an Era of Electronic Media

[Stacy Blasiola]

*Call for Papers*

Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media Special Issue

*Old Against New, or a Coming of Age? Rethinking Broadcasting in an Era of
Electronic Media*

In this special issue edited and authored by graduate students, JOBEM is
calling on emerging scholars to redefine “broadcasting” and explore the
relevance of this term in an age of electronic media. We believe that
graduate students are uniquely situated to change the conversation around
new and old media, rethinking both what it means for media to come of age
and how to study such a phenomenon.

*Special Issue Coordinating Editor-in-Chief*

Stacy Blasiola (University of Illinois at Chicago, sblasi2 at uic.edu)

*Special Issue Guest Editors*

R. Stuart Geiger (University of California, Berkeley)

Airi Lampinen(Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT &
University of Helsinki)

*Deadline for Extended Abstracts:* August 19, 2013

*Full Paper Invitation:* September 22, 2013

*Deadline for Full Papers:* January 6, 2014

*Final Decisions:* May 6, 2014

*Contact:* JOBEMgradIssue at gmail.com

As guest editors for the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, we
know that the term “broadcasting” certainly has the connotations of a
rapidly-disappearing era. There is a strong temptation to sharply
distinguish between old and new media, and “broadcasting” (and even
“electronic”) is a term that is now often associated with the old. We are
constantly told that we are in the midst of a digital/social media
revolution that will make the unidirectional, mass communication model
obsolete. Yet a cursory glance into either the history of media technology
or the contemporary use of new media platforms complicates these dominant
narratives. Do we need new terms to help us think about what it means for
new media to come of age, or do we need to reappropriate old terms?

Do ideas about new media revolutions help us better understand the
complicated relationships between radio and early television programming,
telegraph networks and emerging telephone infrastructure, or musicians and
the various shifts in the recording industry? Do notions of social media
disruptions help us understand how participation takes place in sites like
Wikipedia, reddit, or YouTube, or how these sites are situated in relation
to more established news and media industries? What is the relevance of
“old media” terms such as “broadcasting” for studying today’s social media
platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, tumblr, and Pinterest? We call on
graduate students to start a new thread in the conversation about what it
means for media to be old and new. For us, rethinking “broadcasting” in an
era of electronic media is to neither hastily disregard the legacy of these
terms nor cling to them too rigidly.

As graduate students, we feel a curious resonance with the contradictory
expectations surrounding new media forms. We are called to be apprentices,
learning to participate in a longstanding and well-established institution;
yet at the same time we are called to be radical revolutionaries,
disrupting old ways of thinking. Graduate students, like many new media
services and platforms, face many anxieties about what it means to come of
age in a landscape already filled with towering figures. Many of the issues
we face are longstanding problems that every generation before us also
confronted, but we also face many concerns that are unique to our current
historical situation.

As emerging scholars, we believe that graduate students are uniquely
situated to change the conversation around new and old media, rethinking
both what it means for media to come of age and how to study such a
phenomenon. In this special issue, we call on graduate students to redefine
what “broadcasting” means and explore the relevance of this term in an age
of electronic media. We intentionally leave this open to interpretation. We
seek papers that will theoretically and empirically advance our
understanding of the diverse array of practices, content, people,
technologies, industries, and policies that collectively constitute our
contemporary media ecology.

We call for papers from a wide variety of disciplines and interdisciplinary
fields, recognizing that scholarship can take a variety of different forms.
We invite authors to:

   -

   propose novel theoretical or methodological frameworks to the study of
   media and broadcasting
   -

   critically review and synthesize existing academic literatures about
   media and broadcasting
   -

   discursively analyze various rhetorics and narratives around/in media
   and broadcasting
   -

   document case studies about historical and/or contemporary media and
   broadcasting forms
   -

   relate ethnographic, qualitative, or quantitative studies about the role
   of media and broadcasting in various social contexts
   -

   contact us about any other paper forms, or if you are unsure if your
   paper is suitable for this special issue

* *

*Deadlines and Submission Instructions*

Timeline

Deadline for Extended Abstracts: August 19, 2013

Invitations to Submit Full Papers: September 22, 2013

Deadline to Submit Full Papers: January 6, 2014

Final Decisions to Authors: May 6, 2014

Final Revisions for Full Papers: May 26, 2014

Publication of the Special Issue: September 2014

All submissions must be graduate student driven, meaning that the primary
authors should be enrolled as graduate students (at least) at the time of
submitting extended abstracts.  Although collaborative work with
non-graduate students is acceptable, we seek papers that are primarily
conceptualized and authored by graduate students. Collaborative work with
other students is highly encouraged. Importantly, the corresponding, lead
author–who will be responsible for the paper and interactions with the
editors–must be a graduate student.

Because we anticipate a large number of submissions, we will not initially
accept full papers for review. Interested authors must first send a
proposal of their paper in an extended abstract format of 600-800 words,
not including references. The extended abstract should clearly introduce
and outline the paper, giving reviewers from a wide variety of academic
fields enough context and detail to evaluate its feasibility as a full
paper, intellectual merit, relevance to the special issue theme, and
broader impacts. As the research for these papers may not yet be complete,
we do not expect that extended abstracts will necessarily include all of
the paper’s findings or conclusions. However, the extended abstracts should
outline what kinds of findings or conclusions the authors expect to present
in the final paper. Specifically, extended abstracts should include:

   - a title
   - a description of the paper’s core topic, case, problem, and/or argument
   - the methodological approach, theoretical background, and/or
   disciplinary field
   - the paper’s relevance to related academic literatures
   - expected findings or conclusions
   - expected contributions to the study of media

Extended abstracts must be mailed as an attachment to
JOBEMgradIssue at gmail.com and must be sent in .rtf, .doc or .docx format. We
cannot accept .pdf submissions.

Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be invited to submit a full paper
of no more than 7,500 words (including references). Invited full papers
will be subject to a formal peer review process, and papers will only be
published if they pass JOBEM’s standard reviewing process. Authors must
adhere to a strict schedule for submission and revisions. Authors whose
manuscripts do not get accepted to the special issue are encouraged to
consider submitting revised papers to JOBEM through the normal submission
process.

All submissions must adhere to the formatting guidelines for Journal of
Broadcasting and Electronic Media. Manuscripts must adhere to APA style
format. Complete submission guidelines can be accessed at
http://www.beaweb.org/jobem-guidelines.htm.Full papers must be submitted
online at:http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hbem (select “Special Issue: Grad
Issue” as a manuscript type).

CFP also available at:
http://socialmediacollective.org/2013/06/07/old-against-new-or-a-coming-of-age-rethinking-broadcasting-in-an-era-of-electronic-media/

Stacy Blasiola
IGERT Fellow - Electronic Security & Privacy
JOBEM - Editorial Associate
Department of Communication
University of Illinois at Chicago
1007 W Harrison Street, Behavioral Sciences Building
Chicago, IL 60607