Call for Papers: Media Fields Special Issue - Media Literacy of the American Alt-Right
Submission Deadline: EXTENDED to April 1, 2024
Mediascapes have always been the territories of political movements. It is unsurprising then that scholars in the humanities and social sciences have used mediascapes to examine the ideological boundaries of nation-states, trace the dissemination of underlying belief systems, and distinguish between political mainstreams and extremism. While the notion of extremism and the mainstream have historically been characterized as separate realms, we ask whether preemptively making this distinction is misguided. How are the so-called “dark corners” of the web fed by mainstream media? Mainstream or peripheral mediascapes alike are typically understood to be little more than the means by which a belief system—that is, an ideology—is transmitted. It is ideology that has historically distinguished a political movement as such. However, this relationship between ideology and the mediascape has been critically inverted since the emergence of the American Alt-Right movement in the lead-up to the 2016 national elections. With the Alt-Right movement known for online chaos agents, trolls, and conspiracy theories more so than a definite political agenda, scholars have been forced to ask: has the mediascape displaced belief as the defining characteristic of an American political movement?
This special issue of Media Fields seeks to build on the work begun by the “Alt-Right Media Literacy Series,” an online speaker series and UC-wide graduate student collective on the study of the American Alt-Right movement. We invite proposals that address these and related questions through the concept of media literacy. We define media literacy as the ability to recognize and understand the visual and linguistic coding of Alt-Right media. We ask: how do we develop literacy in the Alt-Right’s mediascape; most simply, how do we recognize Alt-Right media? Because of the online nature of Alt-Right media, and the transnational affinities of global far right movements, we insist that the stakes of this question exceed the United States context.
We welcome proposals from interdisciplinary scholars whose work broadly contributes to the development of “literacy” on the mediascape of the American Alt-Right. Other questions that might be addressed include but are not limited to:
● Intersections and divergences between the Alt-Right movement, white nationalism, and fascism at large
● The impact of trolling on the spread of disinformation and instances of doxxing, harassment, and targeted abuse (Gamergate, Pizzagate)
● The Alt-Right as a media phenomenon. (4chan, Telegram, Gab, Rumble).
● Esoteric, sardonic, anti-feminist, anti-Black, anti-muslim, or anti-semitic dimensions of Alt-Right media
● Online personas: Proud Boys, Trad Wives, NPCs, Normies, Wojaks, Pepes, etc.
● Definitions of the Alt-Right as a political movement, a style, or tendency
● The temporality and duration of the American Alt-Right. Questions of contemporaneity and historical development.
● The Alt-Right’s relationship to crisis and capitalism. Cryptocurrencies, speculative finance, and meme stocks (GameStop, AMC, r/WallStreetBets).
● Comparative treatments of the Alt-Right as a transnational (Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia) or transpolitical phenomenon.
Email your abstract (250–500 words) and bio to altrightmedialiteracy@gmail.com by April 1, 2024.
If you’d like to submit, please consider coming to the Alt-Right Media Literacy Series Symposium on Friday, February 16–Sunday, February 18, 2024. A workshop for this special issue will take place at 4pm on Friday, February 16 and we would love to see you there! See more information here, see the flyer here, and register to attend.
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CFP Media Fields 18: Media Mutualities
Editors: Trinankur Banerjee and Stephen Borunda
Submission Deadline: November 15, 2022
Mediascapes have always been the site of trans-, multi-, and inter-. From transspecies encounters in Jean Painlevé’s zoological journeys within French surrealism, the internationalism gestured in Chris Marker’s “I’ll do what I can” to a young Patricio Guzman’s call for production aid[1] , to the global multilingual manifestations of Black Lives Matter, relationality has always been a prime mover in shaping radical mediascapes. While trans-, multi-, and inter- serve well as descriptive categories of the sociocultural designs that we inhabit, encounter, resist, or even seek to unlearn (Azoulay 2019), the clarion call from both the margins and the centers of capital have been to go beyond mere descriptions of designs. To imagine another design is to first analyze the very design principles that engender such descriptive categories and learn from those principles to make “another world” possible. At the core of every design principle lies a set of relations, fungible or otherwise, that actuate such design.
We at the Media Fields collective suggest that the form of relations at stake for potentiating a new design is mutuality. Mutuality is an active form of relationality. Not dictated by the forces of capital or state, but by an immanent desire to potentiate interrelations among communities, regions, or even species into counterhegemonic action, mutuality is reciprocity’s political offspring. We acknowledge the implicit presence of mutuality in conceptual paradigms like “Hemispheric imagination” (Taylor 2001), “Global South'' (Sousa Santos 2005), “Urban South” (Simeone 2018), “Friction” (Tsing 2004), or “Pluriverse'' (Escobar 2019) as they underline how mutuality shapes cultures and spaces across geographies. Spatial design aside, scholars of commons have also thought of strategies of temporal design. Instead of being bound to capitalist speculative models of risk, they argue for a more radical notion of the commons where the vocabulary of risk is replaced by the praxis of “affirmative speculation” (Uncertain Commons 2014), staying open to futures whose potentialities are not already harnessed by a predictive model of risk. In pushing mutuality to its brink, we propose that mutuality allows a transversal movement across the epistemic categories like Commons, Global South, Hemispheric Imagination etc., binding them together into a field of mutual pedagogy where the design principles implicit in these categories can learn from each other to shape, as Zapatistas remind us, those possible worlds to come.
“Media mutualities” is then an invitation to think of encounters between media, mediation, and mutuality. Both mediation and mutuality are, in effect, design principles of the existing and potentially sensible world(s). “Media mutualities” thus moves along two primary axes of inquiry: a) the ways in which perceived examples of mutuality are mediated, and b) using a capacious understanding of media, how does media facilitate mutuality as a practice. Keeping these two axes as the foci of our present issue, we are interested in a wide spectrum of possibilities of mutualities, ranging from but not limited to:
● Media festivals by oppositional collectives
● Ecocritical thinking, creative geographies, and non-extractive design
● Sensing strategies and their interfaces (e.g. the corporeal, the environmental)
● Conversations between epistemological categories (e.g. Global South, commons, Hemispheric imagination)
● Emergent mediascapes amongst and between marginalized or displaced communities
● The relationship between forms of activism, media, and mutuality
● Genealogies of mutualities in film and media studies (e.g. historiography, theory)
● New archival forms and potential knowledge formations
We are expecting articles of 1500-2500 words (excluding footnotes) from potential contributors. Please email submissions to submissions@mediafieldsjournal.org by November 15, 2022. Please review our submission guidelines at mediafieldsjournal.org ahead of submission.
[1]For more on how Marker supported Guzman’s The Battle of Chile see: https://chrismarker.org/chris-marker-2/patricio-guzman-what-i-owe-to-chris-marker/
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