Public Knowledge Journal Vol. 3, Issue 1 CFP - Media and Society [February 11, 2011]

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Public Knowledge Journal

Public Knowledge Journal seeks articles, book reviews, essays, interviews and multimedia submissions for Volume 3, Issue 1 on Media and Society.

Media allow us to comment, celebrate, and critique culture, politics, and elements of daily life that might otherwise go unremarked (or, at the very least, unpublished). The current political and public furor over WikiLeaks – most recently, over its release of potentially sensitive diplomatic cables – suggests an ongoing conversation over the right to and ownership of public knowledge. Who owns this knowledge now, and who has the right to communicate it? To whom may/can/should it be communicated?

The question of ownership also affects publics, who may once have been only consumers of mediated public knowledge. With the advent of rich distribution channels such as YouTube and an array of citizen journalism sites, those consumers have opportunities to break out of their prescribed roles and produce work with the possibility of reaching a multitude of audiences. We are particularly interested in works that represent this tension between consumption/production, both in content and form.
At the same time, the digital divide continues to exist and evolve. Internet access is becoming more widespread and less expensive for a number of groups, but others have limited or no access to the knowledge available via computers and the devices that are emerging as supplements or replacements to computers.

The editorial board of the Public Knowledge Journal welcomes contributions from graduate scholars in any discipline to the upcoming edition. Some questions that may be addressed include, but are not limited to, the following:
• How do we define new media? Is this media really "new"?
• How might the tensions between so-called traditional media and new media be resolved (if they are to be resolved at all)? These tensions are prevalent across the academy – we welcome perspectives from multiple disciplines on this topic.
• How do new media reify or subvert political, gender, racial, and/or societal norms?
• How do these considerations of media affect our perception, evaluation, or use of information?
• How do we determine rights (rights to, rights from, etc.) in new media?
• How do evolving considerations of media shape our understanding of literacy?
• How is the digital divide evolving? How does it relate to the knowledge divide for different groups? What are the impacts of these divides?
• How are the roles of the media consumer and media producer changing with the advent of rich distribution channels such as YouTube?
• How can we as emerging scholars use alternative media/new media to bring our work to broader audiences? What are the potential benefits and challenges of such alternate communication strategies?
• How do the media define what is newsworthy?
• How do the media contribute to the culture/cult of the celebrity?
• How do the media broaden or limit space for the public intellectual?
• What is the impact of media figures casting themselves in new roles in the public sphere?
• How does media discussion about public issues and institutions shape political discourse in our society? What are the effects of such communication?

Submitting Your Work:
We accept scholarly articles for peer review, as well as book reviews, reflections, interviews, response essays, and other selected non-peer-reviewed work. E-mail all text submissions as Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx) or Rich Text Format (.rtf) attachments to submissions@pkjournal.org. We also encourage multimedia texts, including podcasts, video compositions, and other creative works.

With our new volume, we also announce a new department within the journal. This department provides an opportunity for graduate students to receive immediate and ongoing feedback from colleagues on topics and directions of research. Please e-mail editor@pkjournal.org if you are interested in participating in this new department.

The deadline for scholarly articles and book reviews is February 11, 2011. Non-peer-reviewed and multimedia work will be considered until the next issue is published.

About Public Knowledge Journal:
Public Knowledge Journal is a multidisciplinary, graduate student-run, electronic journal hosted by the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech (ISSN 1948-3511). The journal incorporates a variety of communication technologies to sustain a conversation about the topics and questions raised in each issue. The journal welcomes contributions of articles for peer review, as well as book reviews, essays, interviews and other works using a variety of media. Authors retain copyright to any work that is published in Public Knowledge Journal.