[ecrea] CFP: Transmedia Earth: Understanding Global Convergence Cultures

_CALL FOR PAPERS_

*TRANSMEDIA EARTH:**UNDERSTANDING GLOBAL CONVERGENCE CULTURES

*
*Edited by Matthew Freeman and William Proctor*


Today’s convergent media industries readily produce stories across
multiple media, telling the tales of /Batman/ across comics, film and
television, inviting audiences to participate in the /Star Wars/
universe across cinema, novels, the Web, and more. This transmedia
phenomenon may be a common strategy in Hollywood’s blockbuster factory,
tied up with ideas of digital marketing and fictional worldbuilding, but
transmedia is so much more than movie franchises based in Anglo-American
contexts. As Hay and Couldry emphasise, ‘international differences are
obscured by the generality of the term of the term “convergence
culture”, and it can be helpful to consider convergence “cultures” in
the plural’ (Hay and Couldry, 2011).

While in the US, for instance, we might associate transmedia with
storytelling and the building of franchise fictional worlds like
/Batman/ and /Star Wars/, in the European context, transmedia can occupy
the role of a promotion tool for independent filmmakers, or that of a
site of construction for social reality games, or even serve as
education or as political activism (Scolari, 2014). In Canada,
transmedia has been used as a way to enforce religious radicalisation,
while in Colombia it is a powerful tool for re-building local
communities and re-making memories.

Different cultures around the world are thus now making alternative uses
of transmedia, re-thinking this phenomenon by applying it to
non-fictional cultural projects as a political and social tool for
informing and unifying communities as well as continuing to develop
fictional transmedia narratives. This book aims to offer an introductory
exploration of both non-fictional and fictional global transmediality by
examining how /culture/ (politics, heritage, traditions, leisure, war,
and so on) is informing socio-political forms of transmedia
communication and alternative notions of convergence culture in
different countries across the globe.

We invite chapters from scholars researching transmedia from this
‘glocalised,’ cultural perspective. Chapter proposals may address, but
are not limited to:

  * Transmediality as social tradition
  * Transmediality as political communication
  * Transmediality as documentary
  * Transmediality as heritage
  * Transmediality as leisure
  * Transmediality as cultural fiction
  * Transmediality as education

Please send chapter proposals (300 words) along with a short biography
to the book’s editors Dr Matthew Freeman ((m.freeman /at/ bathspa.ac.uk)
<mailto:(m.freeman /at/ bathspa.ac.uk)>) and Dr William Proctor
((bproctor /at/ bournemouth.ac.uk) <mailto:(bproctor /at/ bournemouth.ac.uk)>) by no
later than _*31st July 2016*_.

We anticipate that completed chapters will be due in January 2017.

This book will be the first publication to emerge from the Transmedia
Earth Network, an interdisciplinary project that aims to investigate the
workings of transmedia within and across national production cultures
around the world. The inaugural conference of the Transmedia Earth
Network will be hosted by EAFIT University, Colombia in 2017. Those
interested in being affiliated with the Network should also contact Dr
Matthew Freeman and Dr William Proctor.


*Dr Matthew Freeman, FHEA*

*Senior Lecturer in Media Communications*
*Director, Media Futures Research Centre*

*CoLA - Digital Academy*

*Bath Spa University*



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