[Commlist] CFP: 'Transmedia Selves' - edited collection

CFP

*Transmedia Selves: Identity and Persona Creation in the Age of Mobile 
and Multiplatform Media*

*Edited by Matthew Freeman (Bath Spa University) and James Dalby 
(University of Gloucestershire)*

*
*

With digital technologies continuing to develop and expand their 
functionality and reach, mobile devices have cemented their essentiality 
in the average individual’s daily life. More than this, the ubiquity of 
media content is one of the defining characteristic of the early 21^st 
century era, in the developed world. Driven by the ongoing synthesis of 
human and device in the form of mobile internet and media communications 
technologies - including the behaviours, interactivities and reliances 
associated with this - and as notions of media become less about 
‘entertainment’ and more closely aligned with the fundamentals of a 
contemporary life, traditional conceptions of ‘the self’ become perhaps 
harder to define.

This edited collection aims to examine this mediated shift in the human 
condition, focusing on the ways in which we synthesise with our media 
content in daily life, subsequently transmediating ourselves into new 
forms. While digital relationships with daily life have been said to 
influence notions of fan participation (Hills, 2002) and things like 
advertising (McStay, 2010), most of the extant literature around digital 
technologies and mobile devices have tended to focus on commercial 
interactive media forms such as promotion videos and consumer websites. 
But as digital technologies and mobile devices continue to bring media 
interfaces into the workings of our daily lives, a salient question is 
not so much ‘/what/ is transmedia?’ but rather ‘/where/ is transmedia?’. 
Today, the social significance of transmediality - itself describing 
‘structured relationships between different media platforms and 
practices’ (Jenkins, 2016) - has become intertwined with daily life, 
shaping the construction of human identities and everyday life in ways 
that goes far beyond its original definitional context of 
franchise-based storytelling (Jenkins, 2006), branding (Grainge and 
Johnson, 2015), and even cultural, political and heritage projects 
(Freeman and Proctor, 2018). As Jansson and Fast (2018: 340) observe, 
‘anyone with access to a connected media device can sign up for a social 
media account, start spreading snapshots from his or her life, 
recommending things to buy or places to go, even setting up a private 
video channel. As media users, we are also increasingly expected to do 
this.’

Building on Jansson and Fast’s attempt to argue for ‘the broadened 
relevance of “transmedia identities” as a term that captures ... how 
transmediatized and liquidized lives are constituted more generally’ 
(2018: 347), this edited collection aims to explore how we can 
understand the practice of ‘using multiple media technologies to present 
information … through a range of textual forms’ (Evans, 2011: 1) as that 
which augments the self and our sociological, psychological and 
philosophical experience of it. By ‘transmedia self’, we mean the use of 
transmediated digital content - namely across mobile mobile devices - to 
transform how people construct and make sense of personal identities, 
with the affordances of mobile media technologies bringing the digital 
and real world together in ways that creates ontologically-complex 
personas across multiple media platforms. We anticipate a focus on the 
ways that people continue to be driven by meaningful social connections 
both on- and off-line, and how the innate human need to share stories 
that allow them to be part of something larger than themselves resonates 
in transmedial terms.

We invite chapters that explore the multifaceted, multi-perspectival and 
cross-disciplinary ways via which the use of different digital and 
mobile media across a multitude of screens, technologies, and locations 
works to build the identities and personal lives of their users in a 
highly experiential and personalized manner. We are especially 
interested in chapters that blend traditional audience research with 
recent advances in the field of transmedia research in ways that offer a 
renewed description of the practices by which people engage through 
multiple media devices. With a focus on mobile media, the collections 
seeks to propose a new, cross-disciplinary theoretical framework based 
on analyses of digital technologies like augmented reality, mobile 
gaming platforms, and social media channels, each of which afford unique 
interactive opportunities to build identities and personas, as well 
shape how those identities and personal interweave with and 
cross-pollinate our daily lives. The collection will therefore serve not 
to redefine ‘transmedia’ necessarily, but rather to expand the term upon 
the possibilities that sociological developments in relation to the 
ubiquity of mobile media content within the context of daily life may 
provide.

Possible topics for consideration may include, but are not limited to, 
the following:

  * Explorations of mediated humanity and reality, e.g. in a
    transhumanist sense;
  * Relationships between transmediality and social mobilization;
  * Analyses of how we now use media to augment ourselves, e.g. the use
    of augmented reality in Snapchat communications;
  * Questions of identity creation in and across mediatised fan cultures;
  * Sociological perspectives on the transmedia self, e.g. a Giddensian
    approach;
  * Philosophical approaches to the transmedia self, e.g. how mobile
    media technologies are shifting meanings of identity;
  * Psychological approaches to the transmedia self, e.g. relationships
    between transmedia platforms, practices, and social connections;
  * Practices of cross-platform play as mobile-based identity creation;
  * Commercialised tensions between personal identity creation and
    mobile-based advertising, e.g. 360-degree promo videos;
  * Potential assimilation of contemporary ludological perspectives,
    e.g. social media as continually evolving game;
  * Locative considerations of the self, e.g. the outsourcing of
    ourselves to devices and media forms;
  * The self in time, e.g. variances in the ways that media platforms
    and experiences encourage perceived notions of ‘duration’ and 
‘present’.

Prospective authors should submit an abstract of 300 words to Matthew 
Freeman ((m.freeman /at/ bathspa.ac.uk) <mailto:(m.freeman /at/ bathspa.ac.uk)>) and 
James Dalby ((jdalby /at/ glos.ac.uk) <mailto:(jdalby /at/ glos.ac.uk)>) by August, 28 
2019. Please also include a biography of around 200 words as part of 
your abstract submission. Successful authors will be invited to submit 
full chapters of 7,000 words, pending contract.


It is planned that the collection will be published by Routledge as part 
of their Routledge Advances in Transmedia Studies 
<https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-Transmedia-Studies/book-series/RATMS> book 
series, itself series edited by Matthew Freeman.



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