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Papers are invited for a collection of essays on Shawn Ryan's award-winning and controversial TV series The Shield. We are seeking critically sophisticated but accessible essays, written from a variety of perspectives, which will stimulate serious debate around this remarkable show.

Contributions may seek to address (but are certainly not limited to) the following topics:

--Racial identity and racial conflict

--Testimony and confession

--Masculinities

--Homosociality and homosexuality

--Familial and symbolic paternities

--Collective identity (gangs, teams, mobs etc) and collective violence

--Bodily inscriptions of violence (wounds, brandings, tattoos etc)

--Prostitution and the female body

--Secrecy and surveillance

--Politics, publicity and the public sphere

--Crime and/as spectacle

--Representations of class difference

--Topologies of L.A.

--The Rodney King case and the L.A. riots

--Religion and religiosity

--Ethics and the law

--The figure of the serial killer

--Autism

--Critical interpretations of the series and/or individual episodes, storylines, characters etc

--Intertextual analyses of The Shield in relation to other TV cop/crime dramas

--Spectatorship and audience analysis

--Series soundtrack

Essays should be rigorous and scholarly, but not abstruse.

Final essays will be approximately 5000 words. Send abstracts of 500-700 words, or completed essays, to Nicholas Ray (n.j.ray_at_leeds.ac.uk <mailto:n.j.ray_at_leeds.ac.uk> ) and Lucy Frank (l.frank_at_btopenworld.com) by 31 October 2006. Please include a CV.

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Received on Wed Aug 16 2006 - 19:57:08 EDT