*CFP* "TIME", SPECIAL ISSUE, M/C - A JOURNAL OF MEDIA AND CULTURE

M/C Journal was founded (as "M/C - A Journal of Media and Culture") in 1998 as a place of public intellectualism analysing and critiquing the meeting of media and culture. M/C Journal is a fully blind, peer-reviewed academic journal, but is also open to submissions and responses from anyone on the Internet. We take seriously the need to move ideas outward, so that our cultural debates may have some resonance with wider political and cultural interests. Each issue is organised around a one word theme (see our past issues), and is edited by one or two guest editors with a particular interest in that theme. Each issue has a feature article which engages with the theme in some detail, followed by several shorter articles. 

Nearly 50 years on from Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, contemporary society finds itself in a new technological age where time is taking on a turbulent and elusive edge. We are reconciling a coexistence of distinct but simultaneous temporalities through digital media, and consequently there is a multiplicity of ways of being in time; a key aspect of our contemporaneity. According to Terry Smith, our contemporaneity is characterised “by the insistent presentness of multiple, often incompatible temporalities accompanied by the failure of all candidates that seek to provide the overriding temporal framework – be it modern, historical, spiritual, evolutionary, geological, scientific, globalizing, planetary… Everything about time these days – and therefore about place, subjectivity, and sociality – is at once intensely here, is slipping, or has become artefactual”. With Smith in mind, time today becomes evasive, contradictory and antonymous while forming a sense of urgency around the changing present. This issue of M/C Journal seeks to unpack the nuances of contemporaneity in digital society today.

Areas of investigation may include but are not limited to:

• Contemporaneity as the condition in which we grapple the present in a time of social, political and ecological turbulence 
• Conceptualisations of time in neoliberal contexts 
• Temporal rationalisations with contemporary media and technology, including but not limited to wearable technologies and GPS tracking devices 
• Technology and efficiency 
• Somatechnical approaches to the body, media, and time 
• Speculative futures with digital media 
• Mediating the present 
• Forecasting and modelling futures in the 21st Century

Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 100-250 words and a brief biography to the issue editors. Abstracts should include the article title and should describe your research question, approach, and argument. Biographies should be about three sentences (maximum 75 words) and should include your institutional affiliation and research interests. Articles should be 3000 words (plus bibliography). All articles will be double-blind refereed and must adhere to MLA style (6th edition).

Details

Article deadline: 4 Oct. 2019

Release date: 4 Dec. 2019

Editors: Christina Chau and Laura Glitsos

Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to time@journal.media-culture.org.au