M/C Journal: Cohesion CFP

 

 

M/C - Media and Culture

is calling for contributors to the 'cohesion' issue of

M/C Journal 

Edited by Donna Hancox & Jaz Choi

Cohesion as a term connotes attraction, unity, and commonness amongst discrete entities. Considering cohesion as a concept is timely with the recent rise of network culture, which comes with both small and radical changes in how people connect with, position themselves in relation to,  and understand other constituents of society. The need to build bonds between human beings, and to bring together otherwise disparate experiences and aspirations is proving evermore crucial to a sustainable future for the world. But is the current and pervasive understanding of cohesion and its implicit promise of harmony or unity possible, or do we need to look for more nuanced and realistic ways to approach the idea of cohesion?

Anheier et al. have re-imagined Bourdieu's view of the positions individuals inhabit within social spaces as a 'network, or a  configuration, of objective relations among positions' (Anheier, et al., 1995).  From  this view the merging of individuals or groups into a cohesive whole becomes less important than the coming together, sometimes only briefly, of ideas into a dynamic and complicated matrix. This is not necessarily to question the obvious advantages of a unified society, rather we seek to ask our contributors if there are new ways of approaching cohesion, and what are the implications for the various disciplines.

Similar observations can be made from the technological perspective. Embedded in everyday life, network technologies engender and accentuate multiplicities: multifaceted self-identity, multitasking, and multisensorial experience via multimedia, for example. As we fast transition from the current network era towards that of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), our social and technological systems and practices become modular-like (Choi, et al., 2009), resonating with what Stone calls 'continuous partial attention' (2006). In this environment, it is cohesion that validates a networked entity by giving it a unified form and/or voice amongst its distributed constituents.

In this issue of M/C Journal, we seek a cohesive understanding of cohesion across disciplines on wide-ranging issues such as the meaning of cohesion, how we understand cohesion, and what we can do with our understanding of cohesion.

Please send a 100-word abstract to the editors at [e-mail]. Articles of 3,000 words in length should be submitted online and should be prepared in accordance with the M/C Journal style guidelines.

Article deadline:     22 Jan. 2010

Issue release date:   24 Mar. 2010

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.