[Commlist] Call for Papers: Violent Labour and Media

Call for Papers: Violent Labour and Media

A special issue of Media Theory (medatheoryjournal.org)

How are media implicated in the expansion of violent labour? Are media 
playing a larger, more structural role in violent labour than they have 
in the past? How can we intervene in this material transformation of 
culture, politics, and economics? The aim of this special issue is to 
explore the relationship between violent labour and media in theory and 
practice.

More than dominating the stories told in our culture industries, violent 
labour (work that involves violence) also dominates much of our daily 
lives. While the U.S. Department of Defense employs over 4 million 
people, violent labour statistics should be extended to include 
everything from security companies to weapons manufacturing, police, 
prison staff, and beyond (Seigel 2018). Teachers, health care providers, 
and general care workers are increasingly trained to respond to violence 
as well, and to employ it if necessary. In the aftermath of school 
shootings, teachers, along with police and security professionals, are 
evaluated as violent labourers: did they follow procedures? Did they 
close the door to protect the class, or risk leaving it open to invite 
in students trapped in hallways? Did they attack, hide, or run, and was 
it the right workplace decision?

Our media, whether emerging, dominant, or residual, are structurally 
implicated in the presence of violent labour in our economy and in our 
lives. Data and lists are understood as instruments for managing armies 
and revolutions and for waging cyberwar (Packer and Reeves 2020, 
Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko 2019); artificial intelligence is 
routinely deployed to yield favourable outcomes in asymmetrical 
conflicts (Jensen et al. 2020); drone warfare has evolved since the 
Obama years with a range of applications in global hot zones like 
Palestine and the Ukraine (Ganguly 2024); and war reporters covering 
violent conflicts on the ground are increasingly unprotected by the 
safeguards of “embedded journalism” (Карпчук and Макар 2023).

Violent media extends to a larger suite of labour practices as well: 
content moderators from the Global South, hired by Google and Meta, are 
tasked with absorbing violent images and with constructing moral 
standards about how violent media is communicated (Gillespie 2021; 
Risewieck and Block 2018); distribution companies like Amazon aim to 
deskill and de-unionize workers through automation (Crawford 2022); and 
digital divides persist, which aggravates the capacity of workers to 
improve their lives, whether in disadvantaged parts of the world or in 
rural and remote areas of wealthier countries (Parks et al. 2023).

Media studies already draws connections between violent labour and 
media, just without using the term. For instance, social media are 
reckoned for their capacities to organize violent labour to harm through 
fake news, flame wars, hate speech, disinformation and political 
polarization (Pé rez-Escolar and Noguera 2022); safety alerts and 
policing apps carry a net psychological impact on users who are trained 
to become vigilant of their immediate physical surroundings to potential 
threats (Ellcessor 2022); while tracking devices, algorithmic 
surveillance, and social media addictions contribute to the 
enshittification of the social world by tech (Doctorow 2024). 
Altogether, the expanded field of violent media promotes an insidious 
“militarization of thinking” (Amoore 2009).

Popular critiques of media, especially new and social media, are often 
framed in terms of the injuries media are supposed to threaten us with. 
However, insofar as such popular critiques are theoretical, they are 
often abstract, resting on a notion of violence disarticulated from 
concrete experiences of late capitalism and imperialism. Theorizing the 
relationship between violence and media and a particular form of labour 
– violent labour – imposes a materializing discipline and an opportunity 
to tell us things we didn’t know about our media that our theories may 
have missed.

This issue seeks to bring to the forefront in our theory how media are 
structurally implicated in the expansion of violent labour around the 
world. Contributors are encouraged to propose submissions that take an 
expansive approach to our reckoning of violent labour and media, and to 
push the boundaries of how we understand the past, present, and possible 
futures for the relations between violence, labour, and media.

Editor

This special issue will be edited by Michael Epp, Professor of Cultural 
Studies at Trent University, and Joshua Synenko, Assistant Professor of 
Cultural Studies at Trent University. Submissions and inquiries can be 
sent to (editors /at/ mediatheoryjournal.org)

Timeline

Please send an abstract of 300 words by September 15, 2024. Please note: 
There are no APCs associated with this journal or this special issue.
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