[ecrea] CFP: Media Fields Journal #14: At the Edge

/Media Fields Journal/is excited to announce the call for papers for 
Issue #14: /At the Edge/.

Please email submissions to (submissions /at/ mediafieldsjournal.org) 
<mailto:(submissions /at/ mediafieldsjournal.org)> bySeptember 28, 2018.

For more information and submission guidelines, visit 
http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org <http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org/>

*Call for Submissions: At the Edge*

*Media Fields Journal*

*University of California, Santa Barbara*

While researching the Hells Angels in the 1960s, Hunter S. Thompson 
wrote “The edge…there is no honest way to explain it because the only 
people who know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” Conceiving 
of the edge as both a site of orientation and a sharp drop-off, Thompson 
gestures towards its dual denotations: as “the line where an object 
begins or ends” and “the cutting side of a blade.” Thus, the edge can 
act both as a form of speculative orientation that provides boundaries 
or points of entry, and as a threshold that offers the possibility of 
“going over.”

As contemporary media scholarship continues to think through the 
proliferation of internet and screen cultures, their edges remain 
crucial to a comprehensive understanding. Scholars such as Adrian 
Mackenzie, Lisa Parks, and Mel Hogan have explored media technologies at 
or beyond their edges, asking how edge environments or experiences might 
alter their ‘typical’ use. Edward S. Casey writes that edges supply “a 
species of /boundaries/, that is, porous edges that take in as well as 
give out—in contrast to /borders/, which act to delimit institutions and 
concrete practices in the life-world.” Casey’s provocation suggests that 
studying media at the fringes or peripheries of society necessitates a 
discussion of the edges that construct their marginality. Additionally, 
edges establish relationalities between entities through their capacity 
to connect the nodes of distributed networks and complex systems. In 
this way, exploring media technologies and practices ‘at the edge’ can 
help locate imagined horizons and connections that inform the boundaries 
of identity, community, and globality.

Explicit academic engagement with the edge has thus far been situated in 
sociology, wherein ‘edgework’ came to be known as the study of 
risk-taking within recreational contexts. Stephen Lyng describes in the 
introduction to /Edgework /how leisure practices centered around risk 
are paradoxically treated as a form of individuality and resistance to a 
neoliberal society that itself demands economic and social precarity 
more and more often. Despite this paradox (or perhaps because of it), 
both individual and systemic risk—living on the edge—can be viewed as a 
means of exploring broad cultural spaces and their boundaries, such as 
those between safety and precarity, inclusion and exclusion, and life 
and death.

The edge as a heuristic thus brings together scholarly work on 
mediatized practices and spaces by examining exactly how their 
boundaries actively (re)imagine and (de)construct the dimensions of 
their existence. In consideration of the utility of the edge to rethink 
conceptualizations of spaces and boundaries, this issue of /Media Fields 
Journal /explores what happens ‘at the edge.’ We invite consideration of 
sites, works, practices, and systems via the constitution of the edge 
and its role as a permeable, although perhaps invisible, entity. We 
welcome work that attempts to locate edges, and/or engages with the 
(potentially traumatic) experience of having ‘gone over.’ We further 
welcome attention to the sociological methodology of ‘edgework’ and how 
it might productively extend to media studies, perhaps involving 
industry norms of precarity and the never-ending quest for production on 
‘the cutting edge.’

Dimensions of media ‘at the edge’ might include (but are not limited to):

  * *Cinematic/Televisual Concerns:*Elimination of the visual/sonic edge
    via wider screens, surround sound, 3-D enhancement, etc.;
    consumption of the image in edge spaces; representations of ‘going
    over the edge.’
  * *Computational Concerns:*Edges and nodes; edges as active and
    mediating sites; the edges of interfaces or platforms such as the
    Samsung Galaxy Edge or Microsoft Edge; imagined digital spaces and
    boundaries.
  * *Environmental Concerns:*Edges of communities, societies, and/or
    shared identities; mediating territorial edges; ecological impacts
    of edgeless or wireless media; media in edge environments such as
    data centers, server farms, media waste, etc.; edges of
    technological reach and possibility.
  * *Experiential Concerns:*Immersive media: virtual reality, augmented
    reality, and the quest for ‘edgelessness;’ risk-taking individuals
    and practices as a cultural tradition or rebellion; technologies
    that mediate risk experiences; sexual practices of ‘edging.’
  * *Industrial Concerns: *Precarity of media labor and innovation
    practices; economic motivations to produce on ‘the cutting edge;’
    speculative horizons of media.

For any inquiries, please contact issue co-editors Jeremy Moore 
((jmoore /at/ umail.ucsb.edu) <mailto:(jmoore /at/ umail.ucsb.edu)>) and Nicole 
Strobel ((nstrobel /at/ umail.ucsb.edu) <mailto:(nstrobel /at/ umail.ucsb.edu)>).


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