CALL FOR PAPERS

Digital Nostalgia in/as Contemporary Creative Practice

Guest edited by Bethany Lamont (Bath Spa University) and Beth Wakefield (Bath Spa University)

We invite proposals from a range of researchers, makers, designers and producers to publish their research and creative practice, critically and creatively exploring the changing and emerging role of nostalgia as a 21st century phenomenon in/as creative practice.

Permeating within and across contemporary culture, nostalgia is essentially everywhere, projecting and inventing new and idealised images of our past. It permeates everything from Hollywood franchises that seem to rely on cultural nostalgia to capture audience attention, to political campaigns that promote a skewed vision of nostalgia to persuade the masses. In this dreamy landscape, questions are evoked about the implications of divorcing individual childhoods, as well as national histories, away from their material realities, and towards a commercial product, or consumable message. More to the point, is the role of nostalgia in today’s culture more amplified than ever before - and if so, what is the relationship between this complex cultural phenomenon and contemporary digital media and creative practices? In other words, how can technology project and invent unique visions of media nostalgia?

This Special Issue of the International Journal of Creative Media Research aims to engage with these questions by exploring the ways in which different disciplines are approaching the question of nostalgia in the digital age, and how 21st century nostalgia is informing a range of creative practices across film, art, literature, education, music, performance and beyond. Above all else, it aims to characterise ‘digital nostalgia’ as an interdisciplinary phenomenon, one that brings together all of this concept’s past meanings, values and associations across medicine, history and politics with the specific cultural and technological moment of today.

Proposal topics may address, but are not limited to:

Platform-specific research into digital nostalgia (e.g., nostalgia in social media, television, film, video games, music, animation)
Emerging practices of/for nostalgia (e.g. nostalgic marketing and fashion)
New understandings of or approaches to nostalgic culture since Covid-19 (e.g., positive cultural relationships to LGBTQ+ identity)
Digital nostalgia and politics (e.g., applications of nostalgic language and imagery in contemporary propaganda and attempts to rewrite histories of oppression)
Digital nostalgia and trauma (e.g., continuing cultural relationships between distortions of the past and traumatic social events)
Creative approaches to expressing meanings of nostalgia in the digital age (e.g., practice-based explorations of theories of nostalgia or fandom practices)

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words (accompanied by a short 100 word biography) to both Bethany Lamont (b.lamont@bathspa.ac.uk) and Beth Wakefield (b.wakefield@bathspa.ac.uk) by no later than July 29, 2022.

The International Journal of Creative Media Research is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed and open access journal devoted to pushing forward the approaches to and possibilities for publishing creative media research. www.creativemediaresearch.org

We will accept work will in one of three submission categories:

'Single-Piece Explorations' (i.e. a single video or audio piece accompanied by a 1,500 word research statement)
'Multi-Piece Portfolios' (i.e. a number of mixed media artefacts like video, image and audio, accompanied by up to a 1,500 word commentary)
'Practice Discoveries' (i.e. a 6,000 word article about an area of creative practice)

Please consult our Author Guidelines page for more information about these submission categories.

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Making and Faking the News

Guest edited by Louis Netter, Olly Gruner, Tom Sykes and Dan McCabe

(University of Portsmouth)

From the politician to the social media pundit, cries of “fake news” resound across the contemporary media landscape. As ideological critique, as ubiquitous Twitter soundbite or, in Bob Franklin and Brian McNair’s words, “attack meme” (2017), the very term has become shorthand for an epoch’s struggle with the rise of populism, culture wars, and a broader crisis of trust within the mainstream media.

And yet, as so many accounts of the fake news phenomenon attest, here is just the latest manifestation of a long-standing debate on truth, spin, misinformation, propaganda and conspiracy. The contemporary moment offers multiple opportunities for exploration as does the historical in manufacturing the pretext for wars, “bad science”, conspiracy, advertising, and slander to name a few. Misinformation has played a consequential role in the shaping of societies. Indeed, as Marcus Gilroy Ware argues, falsehood and distortion are logical epiphenomena of our neoliberal “market-driven society” (2020), in which the profit drive often overtakes ethical and epistemological standards applying to big business, media, education and academic research. The malaise has been aggravated by what Richard Seymour calls the “addiction machine” (2018) of social media, on which platforms users can rapidly and widely disseminate misinformation with little fear of oversight or regulation.

This special edition of the International Journal of Creative Media Research asks how practice research might enable fresh perspectives on the construction and critique of fake news (both contemporary and historical examples). In what ways can artists, designers and moving image makers interrogate fake news’ histories, political and emotional impact and signifying power? How might practitioners confront fake news’ significance within the communication wars, or unpack its “creative” (disingenuous) treatment of reality? Can practitioners examine questions of epistemology (what is knowledge? what is true or false?) using methodologies that are different to traditional theorists’ and thereby help define what should stand in contrast or in opposition to fake news?

Submissions could engage the above questions in a variety of ways, including (but by no means limited to):

Exploring the visual culture of fake news.
Considering the ways in which a creative discipline, and its formal and stylistic qualities, might offer unique perspective on key issues (e.g. “bad science”, political lies and manipulation, historical falsities)
The power of visual storytelling to reach non-academic audiences and improve democratic citizenship with the objective of building public resilience against fake news
Identifying the aesthetic decisions that underpin fake news’ construction and dissemination.
Reflecting on the potential of practice research as a challenge to fake news and its purveyors.
Considering how practice research could contribute to public debates on fake news

Submissions could also explore the following themes:

The propagation of falsehoods related to race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class and nationality.
Bias, distortion and “churnalism” caused by corporate media proprietorship and other economic factors
Consumerism and lifestyle marketing
Conspiracy theory
Historical and contemporary superstition, mythology and belief
Pop cultural discourses on fake news
Deep fakes and digital manipulation

The deadline for 300 word abstracts is December 19th. Please send to Louis Netter (louis.netter@port.ac.uk). Response by January 4th. Final paper submission by March 17th.

We will accept work in one of the 3 submission categories:

Single piece explorations (a single media artefact accompanied by a 1,500 word research statement)
Multi piece portfolios (a number of media artifacts accompanied by a 3000 word research statement)
Practice Discoveries (a 6000 word article intended to advance knowledge about a particular form of practice)

For more information on submission categories please visit the journal website: https://www.creativemediaresearch.org/author-guidelines

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