[Commlist] CFP: Media Fields Journal Issue 16 –“LifeCycles”

Media Fields Journal Issue 16 – “Life Cycles”

Editors: Amaru Tejeda and Miguel Penabella
Submission Deadline: June 1, 2020

Media lives. From the constant flow of broadcast news across time zones 
to the instant, constantly updated feed of social networks, the sense 
that our media is a living thing is central to our understanding and 
experience of it. While recent news lamenting the discontinuation of 
Adobe Flash Player and iTunes suggest media’s clearly delineated life 
expectancies—sparking nostalgic retrospectives and hurried campaigns to 
archive endangered content—the life cycles of media rarely resemble 
teleological timelines towards any deathly finality. As Garnet Hertz and 
Jussi Parikka argue, “Media never dies,” but instead “decays, rots, 
reforms, remixes, and gets historicized, reinterpreted, and collected.” 
One need only look to online fake news campaigns that coopt and 
appropriate media content to construct new meanings of the past, or to 
the uncanny resurfacing of scandalous social media posts that undercut 
the supposed ephemerality of our digital footprint. If media never dies, 
then it is subject to perpetual recovery and transformation, especially 
in the contemporary context of a 24-hour news cycle that demands the 
unbroken replenishment of news stories to maintain a sense of 
never-ending liveness and feed the insatiable demands of global 
spectatorship.
While scholarly fascinations with life/nonlife, living/dead, and 
used/new have frequently been figured in temporal terms, a spatial 
analysis of media life cycles can also serve to complicate our 
understanding of media life and death. One way may involve recognizing 
how the exportation of e-waste to the Global South partly enables the 
experience of media death in parts of the Global North. Technological 
refuse is spatially displaced from Western lines of sight in harmful 
repositories of e-waste that serve as markers for late capitalist 
overproduction. For those living on or adjacent to those sites, such 
media waste is not dead and dormant but continues to affect entire 
livelihoods as toxic outflow and pollutants contaminate the ground, 
waters, and bodies they encounter. The uneven impacts of global 
capitalism feed into the imagination of media obsolescence, as 
supposedly outmoded forms like VHS and cassette tapes continue to find 
productive use even as they are discarded elsewhere. Academic attention 
to media life cycles in and beyond the landfill has compelled scholars 
to more closely investigate the materiality of media, dispelling fixed 
notions of expected, intended, and imagined life expectancies of media 
as it’s salvaged and recirculated, or left to contaminate and toxify the 
planet.

Thus, the Media Fields Editorial Collective at the UCSB Department of 
Film & Media Studies seeks proposals for papers that address the theme 
of “Life Cycles” as a critical framework through which explorations in 
media and space may be more closely examined. In particular, we seek 
submissions that consider the global dimensions of media life cycles in 
ways that frustrate stable notions of life and death. Potential paper 
topics include, but are not limited to:

·      The geopolitics of e-waste and toxicity

·      Global news cycles

·      Residual media

·      Media salvage and repair

·      Remix culture

·      Cooptation of data and digital footprints

·      Media archaeology

·      Media nostalgia

·      Analog format revivals

·      Greenwashing

·      Generational shifts in videogame consoles

·      Secondhand or used markets in media

·      Software updates

·      Media obsolescence and its relationship to consumer capitalism

For any inquiries, please contact issue co-editors Amaru Tejeda 
((amarutejeda /at/ ucsb.edu)) and Miguel Penabella ((penabella /at/ ucsb.edu)).
 Submissions should be approximately 1500–2500 words. For more 
information and complete submission guidelines, please visit 
http://mediafieldsjournal.org/. Please email submissions to 
(submissions /at/ mediafieldsjournal.org) by June 1, 2020.

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