[ecrea] Mobilities, communication and Asia: postcolonial frameworks : call for papers

*Call for articles forspecial issue"**MOBILITIES, COMMUNICATION AND 
ASIA: POSTCOLONIAL FRAMEWORK**S*" To be published in I/*nternational 
Journal of Communication */
/http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc
/
*Guest Edited by Mohan J. Dutta & Raka Shome*, National University of 
Singapore

We are inviting high quality papers on mobilities and communication from 
interdisciplinary scholars working in the Asian context.  This special 
issue will be a combination of invited papers from leading scholars 
working on this theme, as well as submissions received through this call 
for papers.  This issue aims to be a signature issue on this topic.

The global movement of capital, commodities, and labor is constituted 
amid political and economic structures that render salient certain 
meanings of mobility while at the same time erasing other possibilities 
for interpreting mobility. Further, the global movement of capital, 
while enabling and encouraging mobility for some, also render many 
others immobile, disconnected/erased from the possibilities of movement. 
 To that extent, mobility and immobility are not binaries but are 
interrelated—an interrelation that expresses and captures the numerous 
desires and violences of globalization.  The figure of the migrant and 
the various processes of migration make these relations visible while 
rendering invisible other imaginations of migrancy.  Linked to this are 
mediated and communication practices—such as technology, films, music, 
social media, remittances, cultural commodities, and more—that play an 
intrinsic role in shaping and informing various types of migratory moveme!
nts or lack therefor.  Additionally, the transnational migration of 
communication practices themselves constitute new forms of mobilities 
and immobilities, agency and identity formations, imaginations and desires.

Communication is central to these above-mentioned processes.  For 
example, technology firms are constantly developing new communication 
language through software that requires a constant flow of transnational 
expert workers who are often treated in problematic ways (in terms of 
cultural recognition and wages) in “host” nations.  Similarly, finance 
capital globally circulates through communicative values and processes 
(including migrant remittances to their nation of “origin’—a process 
itself underwritten by non-western values of domesticity and 
familiality).  Transnational movements of celebrities and popular 
culture (for instance, in Asia) serve diasporic populations in many 
parts of Asia that have implications for their migrant experience as 
well as the production of a transnational Asian identity.  Disempowered 
and often stateless migrants (for instance migrant Bangladeshi workers 
in Asia) connect to or engage their music in their diasporic situations 
—to produce some sense of cultural security in an otherwise coercive 
exploitative condition (lacking decent food, shelter, wages and more).

Relations of gender, sexuality, religion, class and nationality are 
central considerations in these phenomena since migration itself is 
often wrought with gender and religious violences, discrimination and 
exploration of poor laborers, and the devaluing of peoples of particular 
nations in global migratory practices (for instance, White Europeans or 
Americans are usually seen as “expatriates” while the word migration is 
reserved for mobilities of non-western peoples even within non-western 
‘host’ nations).

Communication Studies as a formal field has hardly paid attention these 
issues—issues that require urgent exploration from a communication 
perspective.  Such an exploration will further move the field of 
Communication Studies into considerations of the many dilemmas and 
challenges of the 21st century that are grounded in the politics of 
migration.

This edited Special Section seeks to comprehend such phenomena, with 
specific attention to Asia. It will examine the interplay of 
communication (broadly considered)—particularly mediated practices—and 
im/mobilities, attending to how the intersection between the two 
illustrate the movement of people, labor, representations, commodities, 
technology and more, across global circuits of culture, economy, and 
geopolitics.

*Submissions will be limited to 6000 words, all-inclusiv*e

We first solicit detailed abstracts of approximate 500-600 words.  Due: 
* April 31, 2017*. Please send abstract to Mohan Dutta at 
(cnmmohan /at/ nus.edu.sg) <mailto:(cnmmohan /at/ nus.edu.sg)>

Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by *May 31, 2017.*

Final papers due: * July 31, 201*7 Please submit to Mohan Dutta at 
(cnmmohan /at/ nus.edu.sg) <mailto:(cnmmohan /at/ nus.edu.sg)>

Please follow author guidelines of the journal (link above)

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