[ecrea] CfA Media and Mobility

Call for Articles: Media and Mobility section of Transfers: 
Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies





Transfers, now in its fourth year of publication, is emerging as a key 
peer-reviewed platform for new research into the practices, experiences 
and representations of disparate mobilities. In its mission to rethink 
mobility, the journal also provides a forum for innovative research at 
the intersection of mobility and media studies. The focus lies on 
contemporary and historic interactions and linkages between transport, 
traffic, communication, and media in its broadest sense. Transfers has 
outlined this field in a special section on ‘Traffic - On the Historical 
Alignment of Media and Mobility’ in 2013 (1).



To further elaborate on the ‘media and mobility’ link, we invite 
submissions that investigate the diverse relations between technology, 
mobility, and media. This includes submissions that analyze the role of 
infrastructures with respect to communication and transport, or the 
‘mobilization’ of communication and media technologies and the 
‘mediatization’ of transportation, and its long-term development. We 
also invite contributions that link media to mobility more 
theoretically, e.g. by conceptualizing media as an intermediary field 
that always includes and negotiates aspects of mobility. We encourage 
submissions that treat ‘media’ and ‘mobility’ as entangled entities, 
that discuss their spatio-temporal and historical dimensions in respect 
to what it means to be mobile or to migrate, and that explore the 
embodied, affective, and interpersonal dimensions of media and mobility.



In particular, we suggest three fields of research that entail multiple 
perspectives on media, mobility, and their relationships:



1) Media technologies in the context of transportation: Any 
transportation needs communication, and media technologies were and are 
used to improve, control or enhance travel and its safety or comfort. 
This field has multiple facets; it includes media-based traffic 
simulation systems, the interconnectedness of virtual and physical 
travel as well as navigation technologies or the question of how spaces 
were and are experienced by those who are moving and consuming media. 
Moreover, media and transportation technologies have a long shared 
history, with the telegraph-railway symbiosis of the 19th century, the 
media-saturated cars of the 20th century or the mobile locative media of 
the 21st century being prominent examples.



2) Mobility and transportation technologies in the context of media: 
Mobility technologies and motion techniques are used as artistic methods 
in the media and the arts (e.g., tracking shots or so-called ‘phantom 
rides’ in motion pictures; flight simulation, etc.). Yet, novel 
transportation technologies are not only used, portrayed, or discussed 
in different media as motif. Rather, due to their specific modes of 
perception, such technologies generate new means of (re-)presentation 
which lead to changes within the media sector (e.g., fragmentation 
techniques in art, montage in film, interactive and multimedia 
applications in computer games). This field investigates intermedial 
relations, such as structural similarities between processes of 
locomotion and processes of seeing or recording in motion. Moreover, a 
prime example for connecting 1) and 2) would be the case of mobile media.



3) Traffic and media as exchange, transportation and communication: A 
third field concerns research that takes up historical meanings of 
‘traffic’ and ‘communication’ when these terms meant both the movement 
of people and objects, and of ideas, words, images, or bits 
respectively. This includes research inside media studies and media 
history that expands a narrow understanding of ‘media’ in favour of a 
broader concept of ‘mediation’. Articles might analyse the ‘unfixedness’ 
of media, or investigate how novel mobility or media technologies have 
been appropriated and how, subsequently, this modified or co-shaped 
mentalities and discourses, the perception of space, and contemporary 
mobility concepts.



Transfers aims to combine the empiricism of traditional mobility history 
with more recent theoretical approaches in media and mobility studies, 
media theory and media historiography in its ‘media and mobility’ 
section. In line with our wider mission, we especially welcome work on 
media and mobility in the Global South. We invite intellectually 
rigorous, wide ranging, and conceptually innovative contributions from 
diverse disciplinary backgrounds.



Please refer to the Info for Authors page for submission and style 
guidelines and to the Journal Contributors' page for general information 
and guidelines regarding topics such as article usage and permissions 
for Berghahn journal article authors.



See http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/trans/



Editor:

Gijs Mom, Eindhoven University of Technology



For the ‘media and mobility’ section, you might contact:

Regine Buschauer, (rebus /at/ bluewin.ch)

Dorit Müller, (dorit.mueller /at/ fu-berlin.de)

Gabriele Schabacher, (gabriele.schabacher /at/ uni-siegen.de)

Mimi Sheller, (mimi.sheller /at/ drexel.edu)

Sunny Stalter, (sls0009 /at/ auburn.edu)

Heike Weber, (hweber /at/ uni-wuppertal.de)











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