[csaa-forum] CFP: M/C Journal 'cute' issue

[James Meese]

Hi everyone - submissions are now open for our 'cute' issue, with articles due by 28 Feb. 2014. The journal release date is 30 Apr. 2014
Please contact us for further information or to submit a proposal at the following address: cute at journal.media-culture.org.au.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 9 Dec. 2013

                         M/C - Media and Culture
                    http://www.media-culture.org.au/
          is calling for contributors to the 'cute' issue of

                               M/C Journal
                  http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

M/C Journal is inviting 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/<http://journal.media-culture.org.au/provides>
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: 'cute'
              Edited by James Meese and Ramon Lobato

Cute content is a fundamental but under-researched component of the Internet
economy. Millions of people around the world start their day with videos of
kittens, puppies and meerkats. Recent years have seen the rise of global
animal brands, such as Maru and Grumpy Cat, along with new talent agencies
for this purpose. Online portal I Can Haz Cheezburger has received millions
of dollars in venture capital funding, becoming a diversified media business
in its own right. YouTube channels, Twitter hashtags and blog rolls form an
infrastructure across which a vast amount of cute-themed user-generated
content, as well as an increasing amount of commercially produced and
branded material, now circulates.

Cute content can also be understood as an aesthetic tradition. Tracing the
history of animal imagery leads us to a range of practices - kitsch
portraiture, stock photography, greeting card imagery - as well as newer
online spaces, such as the 4chan message boards, which have resignified the
captioned cat pic as a geek subcultural practice. Approaching cute content
as a sphere of contemporary cultural production raises a number of questions
for analysis. How can we contextualise digital cute content within a longer
history of mediated human-animal interactions? What is the nature of animal
celebrity and stardom? What textual forms does online cute imagery take in
different national and regional contexts?

This issue of M/C Journal invites contributions interested in exploring
'cute' as a mode of textual production and as a sector of the Internet
economy. Possible topics to be addressed include, but are not limited to,
the following:

* Histories of animal imagery in digital and pre-digital contexts
* The specificity of particular national and regional cute cultures
* Authorship and genre in cute content
* The political economy of cute content
* Intellectual property and attribution disputes
* Case studies of animal celebrities, memes, and cute portals
* Comparative perspectives on cute cultures

Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 100-250 words and a
brief biography to the issue editors. Abstracts should include the article
title and should describe your research question, approach, and argument.
Biographies should be about three sentences (maximum 75 words) and should
include your institutional affiliation and research interests. Articles
should be 3000 words (plus bibliography). All articles will be refereed and
must adhere to MLA style (6th edition).

Article deadline:     28 Feb. 2014
Issue release date:   30 Apr. 2014

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.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.cdu.edu.au/pipermail/csaa-forum/attachments/20131218/32d37d14/attachment.html