[ecrea] CfP Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication - Digital Intimacies: Exploring digital media and intimate lives in the Middle East

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication
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> Special Issue Call for Papers
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> Digital Intimacies:
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> Exploring digital media and intimate lives in the Middle East
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> Over the last decade, the spread of digital technologies has 
profoundly reshaped intimate lives worldwide, transforming the ways in 
which people are involved in intimate relationships and experience love, 
sexuality and emotions in everyday lives. Like other places, in the 
Middle East, millions use the internet on a daily basis to access a 
variety of music and cultural products, and to communicate, create and 
maintain relationships with partners, family members, friends and 
lovers, as well as for activism. Indeed, along with providing spaces for 
different modes of activism and resistance, digital platforms have 
become critical arenas in which young people negotiate ideas and 
practices of love, dominant gender roles and religious and societal 
values. While some work has begun to critically engage with the use of 
the Internet for activism, very little is known of the ways in which 
digital platforms and different technologies (including mobile phones) 
can remold imaginaries and practices of love and friendship and mediate 
the ways in which “intimacy” is experienced and lived in the Middle East.
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>
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> This special issue aims to fill the gap in the scholarship on 
intimate lives and digital media in Middle East by focusing on the 
everyday uses of digital platforms and addressing their material, 
gendered and imaginative implications for practices. We welcome articles 
from a wide range of disciplines (including and not restricted to 
anthropology, sociology, internet, cultural and media studies) that draw 
on empirically-grounded studies and that raise broader methodological 
and theoretical reflections. Some of the questions we hope to address are:
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>
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> 1. New imaginaries of love and marriage: how does people’s access to 
online cultural products (within Islamic and non-Islamic contexts) 
contribute to remoulding their romantic imaginations, conventional 
courtship practices and intimate desires?
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> 2. Digital media practices: which are the actual media practices 
whereby young people create, maintain, and end intimate relationships 
through digital media? How do social media expand inter-personal 
communicative possibilities and wide people’s social networks beyond 
immediate family and community based networks?
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> 3. Digital media in long distance relationships: how are digital 
media used in long-distances relationships between family members and 
lovers, in national and transnational contexts?
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> 4. Digital media and social change: how do media practice challenge, 
reproduce and reinforce dominant social practices and gendered 
imaginaries? What is the impact of online practices on the way people 
experience intimacy in the every-day life?
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> 5. Digital technologies, sex and sexuality: how do people have sex 
online? How do they produce and consume pornography?
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> 6. The use of the internet by LGBTQ people: how do they create 
network, form communities and communicate online?
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> Deadline for submission of abstracts is 30 September 2014.
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> Abstracts should not exceed 500 words and should provide a short 
explanation of your contribution to this special issue, provide a clear 
description of the proposed approach, the theoretical framework and 
empirical data.
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> Notification of acceptance of abstracts: 15 November 2014
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> Deadline for submission of complete manuscripts: 30 March 2015
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> Articles should be between 6000- 7000 words long and include an 
abstract of 150 words, the author’s affiliation and email address and at 
least five keywords
>
> Please send a paper proposal along with a short bio by 30 September 
2014 to Elisabetta Costa (University College London) at 
(e.costa /at/ ucl.ac.uk); and to Laura Menin (University of Milano Bicocca) at 
(l.menin /at/ campus.unimib.it).
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> MEJCC is a peer-reviewed journal published by Brill three times a 
year (http://www.brill.com/middle-east-journal-culture-and-communication
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> Elisabetta Costa,
> Postdoctoral Research at UCL
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> (e.costa /at/ ucl.ac.uk)
> 
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/social-networking/projects/social-networking-social-science
> www.gsmis.org
>



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