[KineJapan] Media Mix CFP

Mon Nov 1 12:36:08 EDT 2021

Dear KineJapan colleagues,

I hope this finds you well.

Please consider submitting a paper to the following special issue of Mechademia which I’ll be editing on the topic of the media mix, or passing this along to friends/colleagues/students who may be interested. Thank you!

Vol. 16.1: Media Mix
Guest ed. Marc Steinberg (Due July 1, 2022)

“Media mix” names the practice of creating, marketing, and engaging cultural goods serially across media types – from light novels and anime to toys and foodstuffs. In some accounts it also means the system of practices termed transmedia storytelling; in others it names an ecology of practices and relations between media forms; in yet others it names the queer potentialities or community-forming properties of fan-based practices around cross-media serializations.
            This volume of Mechademia:Second Arc seeks papers that shed new light on the media mix as practice, as theory, or as history. Building on the work of the past two decades on the topic, this special issue calls for new approaches and new forms of analysis of the media mix. The focus of papers may be on individual media mix series; on the practices of a given anime studio or game company; on the impact of streaming platforms on the media mix; on the historical development of specific media mix models; on the ways different epistemologies can bring out distinct histories of the media mix; or on the ways feminist or decolonial media histories might challenge existing media mix paradigms. Papers may focus on a particular outpost of media mix, for instance figure manufacturing and the politics of plastic use involved; on the centrality of IP; or on the geographical composition of media mixes – from the transnational nature of anime production to the dispersed manufacturing geographies of production to the transcultural circuits of consumption and affinities created among fans of a particular media mix series. Contributions may be conceptual or archival; may offer overviews or a state of the field or focus on a particular area of intervention.
Authors are encouraged to be bold in both building on and rethinking existing paradigms. They are encouraged to look to historical, spatial, and archival “elsewheres” in their analysis that supplement blind spots in existing research. And they are encouraged to engage new approaches from fields not yet centered in media mix analysis – from critical race studies to organizational media studies to disability media studies to production studies to studio histories to platform studies to sexuality studies. They may also expand the geography of analysis from Japan to elsewheres that are equally impacted by the media mix, or that take up media mix-like practices.

Possible topics for this special issue include those noted above, as well as the following:

  *   Media mix models or paradigms (including its parallel terms: cross media, transmedia, one source multi use, etc.)
  *   Industry and media labor perspectives on the media mix
  *   Geographies of the media mix (i.e. physical or media geographies)
  *   Material cultures and physical spaces of the media mix (the city, the retail store, the amusement park, the café)
  *   Government promotion (“Cool Japan”), industrial policy, and the media mix
  *   The media mix in China, Korea, other parts of Asia or the world
  *   Media mix in the context of colonialism and empire
  *   Narrative tropes, aesthetics, and media mix styles (ex: loop narratives, BL, slice of life, etc.)
  *   The role of particular media – weekly magazines; animation; games; the internet; platforms like YouTube or Niconico Video or Bilibili; apps like LINE or WeChat – in generating particular models of the media mix
  *   Animation or film studios and the media mix
  *   Intersection of media mix and distribution systems – from the convenience store to book and magazine distributors (Tohan and Nippon Shuppan) to Amazon logistics to streaming platforms
  *   Media infrastructures, logistics, and the media mix
  *   Sound in/and the media mix
  *   Environmental media and ecological approaches to the media mix
  *   The media mix as it relates to time, seriality, and sequentiality

Any other topics and approaches are also very welcome.

The deadline for submission of essays for this volume is: July 1, 2022. All submissions should be sent to submissions at mechademia.net<mailto:submissions at mechademia.net>. Please indicate the title of the volume you are submitting to as follows: “Submission–SA16.1: "Media Mix” in the subject line. Submit two copies of your article as a Word document. One of these copies should be anonymized: do not include your name anywhere in the article (named citations of your own work are acceptable, provided you do not use first-person language to discuss the work in question).

Submissions should be 5,000-7,000 words and follow the Mechademia Style Guide<https://www.mechademia.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Mechademia-Style-Guide-2018a.pdf>, which is based on the Chicago Manual of Style<https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/01/>. Figures (and separately submitted captions) are limited to eight per essay; image permissions are the responsibility of authors upon acceptance. Submissions: 5,000-7,000 words including citations in Chicago Style, 17th ed. in Bibliographic Endnote form with no notes or CFs; in Word only, no PDFs. Figures are limited to 8 images and/or tables, at least 300DPI and in either TIFF or JPG formats submitted in a separate file and not embedded in the text, with captions submitted on separate Word document. Permissions are the responsibility of the author. The Mechademia Style Guide can be found at www.mechademia.net<http://www.mechademia.net>

best wishes,
Marc

Marc Steinberg
Associate Professor, Film Studies
PhD Graduate Program Director, Film and Moving Image Studies
Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema
Concordia University
Pronouns: He/Him

Concordia University is located on unceded Indigenous lands. The Kanien’kehá:ka Nation is recognized as the custodians of the lands and waters on which we gather today.
L'Université Concordia est située en territoire autochtone, lequel n’a jamais été cédé. Nous reconnaissons la nation Kanien'kehá: ka comme la gardienne des terres et des eaux sur lesquelles nous nous réunissons aujourd’hui.

Recent books:

  *   Media and Management<https://meson.press/books/media-and-management/> (with Rutvica Andrijasevic, Julie Yujie Chen, and Melissa Gregg)
  *   The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Internet<https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-platform-economy>