[Commlist] CFP: “Critical and Creative Engagements with Petro-Media” / special issue of Imaginations

Call for Submissions: “Critical and Creative Engagements with 
Petro-Media” special issue of Imaginations

Appel à soumissions : Numéro spécial d'Imaginations sur « Les 
Engagements critiques et créatifs avec les pétro-média »

Guest edited by Rachel W. Jekanowski (Memorial University) & Emily Roehl 
(Texas State University)

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: DECEMBER 10, 2020

This special issue of Imaginations will concentrate on media engaging 
with petroleum and its attendant socio-political and economic 
structures. Drawing on technology and media studies, energy humanities 
scholarship, and a range of methods in visual and cultural studies, the 
contributors will theorize contemporary and historical uses of media to 
resist and facilitate petroleum infrastructures. Building on 
Imaginations’ long-standing engagement with petrocultures scholarship, 
including their 2012 special issue “Sighting Oil” (Sheena Wilson and 
Andrew Pendakis, eds.), this issue will mobilize critiques of corporate 
petro-media with decolonial methods from a range of disciplines, 
focusing on the interlacing of oil, settler colonialism, Indigenous 
resurgence, and media production. The issue will consist of 
peer-reviewed essays from scholars and practitioners, artist interviews 
and contributions (including samples of multimedia work with 
accompanying artists statements), and a review section (including a 
comparative book review essay, curatorial reviews and responses to 
digital exhibitions in the age of COVID-19, etc.). We are particularly 
invested in featuring research-creation and media-rich scholarship.

We invite submissions that take up different facets of media production 
by Indigenous, immigrant, and settler artists, activists, and corporate 
representatives to examine the complex entanglements of cultural 
production, settler colonialism, and fossil fuel extraction. Given our 
location on occupied Indigenous territories where we work as researchers 
and educators, we assert that energy developments are always already 
implicated within histories of colonialism and white settlement in North 
America. Critically, we invite contributions that include and foreground 
visual media in their analyses, featuring original videos, archival 
photographs and film stills, and photographs of authors’ art installations.

We invite submissions that engage with the following topics (including 
but not limited to):

* the way media networks and ways of viewing the world support the 
extraction, production, and consumption of fossil fuels and interact 
with the financial and socio-political systems the production of oil 
requires;
* the way media, like energy infrastructures, are used as conduits for 
the transportation and transmission of fuel, people, capital, and ideas 
about sovereignty, identity, futurity, and relationships to the nonhuman 
world;
* the way various media—from corporate films, digital photography, 
games, and television advertisements, to activist protests and social 
media—have alternatively been used to uphold, legitimize, critique, and 
resist energy practices within settler colonial nations like Canada and 
the United States.

Submissions are also welcome from the following fields and approaches 
(including but not limited to):

- cultural studies
- energy studies
- critical Indigenous studies
- critical settler colonial studies
- decolonial approaches to media
- environmental humanities
- Indigenous sovereignty
- film and media studies
- literary studies
- multimedia and digital arts
- petrocultures
- research-creation methods
- social and environmental justice
- feminist, queer, and posthumanist approaches to petro-media
- interventions from critical race studies

In sum, this special issue will contribute to discussions within media 
and literature studies about the imbrication of energy, communication, 
and art, while foregrounding Indigenous resurgence, energy justice 
movements, and deepening attention to the asymmetrical effects of 
climate change on communities and environments.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Recognizing the challenges of producing work during a pandemic, and 
reflecting the editors’ commitment to experimenting with mixed 
methodologies and media-rich scholarship, this special issue will 
feature shorter research essays alongside artist submissions and 
research-creation. Research essays should be 3000-5000 words; artist 
contributions and curatorial reviews can be 500-2000 words. Citations 
should adhere to the MLA Style Guide.

All submissions must be sent to (imaginations /at/ ualberta.ca) 
<mailto:(imaginations /at/ ualberta.ca)> and copied to (mrln /at/ yorku.ca) 
<mailto:(mrln /at/ yorku.ca)> and (bbellamy /at/ ualberta.ca) 
<mailto:(bbellamy /at/ ualberta.ca)>. Please include a separate sheet with 
short biographical and contact information. Media can be emailed as an 
attachment or accessible by hyperlink.

The Imaginations Journal style sheet is accessible here 
<http://imaginations.glendon.yorku.ca/?page_id=7034>.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS DECEMBER 10, 2020.

We plan to notify contributors as to the status of their submissions by 
May 2021 at the latest. The special issue is tentatively planned for 
publication in Fall 2021.

CONTACT US
Please direct questions and inquiries to issue editors Emily Roehl 
((e.a.roehl /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(e.a.roehl /at/ gmail.com)>) and Rachel W. 
Jekanowski ((rjekanowski /at/ mun.ca) <mailto:(rjekanowski /at/ mun.ca)>).


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