[ecrea] CFP: MediaTropes special issue, "Oil and Media, Oil as Media"

Oil and Media, Oil as Media

A Special Issue of Media Tropes

Call for Papers

One need not look far to see the ways that oil and its infrastructures 
mediate contemporary cultural and material experience. Highways, along 
with the vehicles that populate them, proliferate among rural and urban 
landscapes. Newsmedia, both online and off, overflow with headlines 
discussing the global economics and geopolitics of oil on the one hand, 
and oil spills and other ecological consequences of the production and 
consumption of oil on the other. And, no matter how much we may 
collectively desire otherwise, we continue to remain within the confines 
of a society primarily organized around the production and consumption 
of oil and other fossil fuels--within the confines of what has come to 
be understood as petroculture (LeMenager 2014). Yet, for all its 
ubiquity, thinking through the nuanced (and, of course, much less 
nuanced) ways in which oil mediates contemporary life is a daunting 
task. Previously left largely to the economists, engineers, and 
political scientists, the study of oil has only very recently been 
opened up as a space of inquiry for cultural critics, despite its 
mediating role in contemporary life and its ubiquitous presence in 
visible and less visible ways.

With an increasingly accelerated pace, work that examines oil from a 
social and cultural vantage-point has carved a path for confronting the 
ways in which oil shapes. 2012 saw the publication of a special issue of 
the Journal of American Studies on oil cultures, edited by Ross Barrett 
and Daniel Worden as well as a special issue of Imaginations: Journal of 
Cross-Cultural Image Studies, “Sighting Oil,” edited by Sheena Wilson 
and Andrew Pendakis. These issues examine oil’s social and cultural 
life, positioning it as a social relation rather than an exclusively 
technical or technological one by examining oil’s material and cultural 
presences and residues in, for instance, documentaries (Szeman 2012), 
film (Worden 2012), and photography (Truscello 2012). And work that 
traces the material relationship between energy and digital media, 
including Jussi Parikka’s A Geology of Media (2015) and Benjamin 
Bratton’s The Stack (2016), are beginning to map our simultaneously 
petroleum-fueled, cloud-based present.

Oil and its infrastructures, then, are both mediating and mediated. This 
special issue of Media Tropes aims to contribute the burgeoning field of 
the energy humanities by providing accounts of the ways in which oil 
(and its infrastructures)mediatesand is mediated.

What ways can or is oil typically represented as a mediating presence or 
as an object that is mediated? How is oil (trans)formed in media within 
an increasingly interconnected and globalized Western society? How have 
various forms of media mediated the cultural construction of oil and 
oil-related events in the Western social imaginary? How has the 
emergence and development of social media altered the promotion of oil 
and/ or its counter-discourses? If we consider media itself as a kind of 
language, what does oil look like through a particular media’s 
“language” or what political, social, and/or cultural language is 
created with the combination of oil and media? How do feminist 
perspectives alter our understanding of energy in the media? In what 
ways can or does media and/or investigating media trends impact the 
cultural, social and political production of energy in the future? What 
different ways do various forms of media currently envision the future 
of energy?

We invite contributions from scholars studying oil and energy in diverse 
fields including but not limited to cultural studies, mobility studies, 
gender and sexuality studies, energy humanities, technoculture studies, 
petroculture studies, and environmental studies. We are interested in 
original work in a variety of formats including scholarly articles, 
creative works, book reviews, and multimedia works in English or French. 
Possible topics include media in relation to oil and/or the mediation of 
oil in one or more of the following areas:

  *

    Infrastructures

  *

    Landscape

  *

    Automobility

  *

    Environment/ecology

  *

    Gender and sexuality and/or feminist perspectives

  *

    Indigenous and/or colonial politics of oil

  *

    Political economy

  *

    Film, art, photography, or other visual rhetoric

  *

    Labour relations

  *

    Social media

  *

    Advertising and promotional media

  *

    Spills, spectacle, and/or slow and fast violence

  *

    Mainstream media

  *

    Counter-discourses

  *

    Climate change

  *

    Real or imagined constructions of oil

  *

    History of oil or other forms of energy

  *

    Envisioning change

  *

    Energy futures

MediaTropes, http://mediatropes.com, is a peer-reviewed, 
transdisciplinary Open Access journal addressing the figures of culture, 
technology, and media/mediation, broadly construed. We are a 
non-commercial journal run by volunteers and copyright belongs to the 
author, your work is yours. Our most recent special issue is titled, 
“War and Intelligence,” and we invite you to explore it; our forthcoming 
issue is titled, “Indigenous Matters: Cultures, Technologies, 
Mediations.” We are indexed widely and receive some 30,000 hits per 
month globally. Finally, MediaTropes is one of three Open Access 
journals honoured “for their mission of fostering positive, democratic 
change around the world” by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy.

Proposals, due on August 31, 2017, should be between 300 and 500 words. 
All proposals, and any further inquiries, should be sent by email to 
Jordan Kinder ((jkinder /at/ ualberta.ca) <mailto:(jkinder /at/ ualberta.ca)>) and/or 
Lucie Stepanik ((lstepani /at/ ualberta.ca) <mailto:(lstepani /at/ ualberta.ca)>).


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