*CFP* "CRITICAL AND CREATIVE ENGAGEMENTS WITH PETRO-MEDIA", SPECIAL ISSUE, IMAGINATIONS JOURNAL

This special issue of Imaginations will concentrate on media engaging with petroleum and its attendant socio-political and economic structures. Drawing on technology and media studies, energy humanities scholarship, and a range of methods in visual and cultural studies, the contributors will theorize contemporary and historical uses of media to resist and facilitate petroleum infrastructures. Building on Imaginations’ long-standing engagement with petrocultures scholarship, including their 2012 special issue “Sighting Oil” (Sheena Wilson and Andrew Pendakis, eds.), this issue will mobilize critiques of corporate petro-media with decolonial methods from a range of disciplines, focusing on the interlacing of oil, settler colonialism, Indigenous resurgence, and media production. 

The issue will consist of peer-reviewed essays from scholars and practitioners, artist interviews and contributions (including samples of multimedia work with accompanying artists statements), and a review section (including a comparative book review essay, curatorial reviews and responses to digital exhibitions in the age of COVID-19, etc.). We are particularly invested in featuring research-creation and media-rich scholarship.

We invite submissions that take up different facets of media production by Indigenous, immigrant, and settler artists, activists, and corporate representatives to examine the complex entanglements of cultural production, settler colonialism, and fossil fuel extraction. Given our location on occupied Indigenous territories where we work as researchers and educators, we assert that energy developments are always already implicated within histories of colonialism and white settlement in North America. Critically, we invite contributions that include and foreground visual media in their analyses, featuring original videos, archival photographs and film stills, and photographs of authors’ art installations.

We invite submissions that engage with the following topics (including but not limited to):

• the way media networks and ways of viewing the world support the extraction, production, and consumption of fossil fuels and interact with the financial and socio-political systems the production of oil requires;
• the way media, like energy infrastructures, are used as conduits for the transportation and transmission of fuel, people, capital, and ideas about sovereignty, identity, futurity, and relationships to the nonhuman world;
• the way various media—from corporate films, digital photography, games, and television advertisements, to activist protests and social media—have alternatively been used to uphold, legitimize, critique, and resist energy practices within settler colonial nations like Canada and the United States.

Submissions are also welcome from the following fields and approaches (including but not limited to):

• cultural studies
• energy studies
• critical Indigenous studies
• critical settler colonial studies
• decolonial approaches to media
• environmental humanities
• Indigenous sovereignty
• film and media studies
• literary studies
• multimedia and digital arts
• petrocultures
• research-creation methods
• social and environmental justice
• feminist, queer, and posthumanist approaches to petro-media
• interventions from critical race studies

In sum, this special issue will contribute to discussions within media and literature studies about the imbrication of energy, communication, and art, while foregrounding Indigenous resurgence, energy justice movements, and deepening attention to the asymmetrical effects of climate change on communities and environments.


Submission Guidelines

Recognizing the challenges of producing work during a pandemic, and reflecting the editors’ commitment to experimenting with mixed methodologies and media-rich scholarship, this special issue will feature shorter research essays alongside artist submissions and research-creation. Research essays should be 3000-5000 words; artist contributions and curatorial reviews can be 500-2000 words. Citations should adhere to the MLA Style Guide.

All submissions must be sent to imaginations@ualberta.ca and copied to mrln@yorku.ca and bbellamy@ualberta.ca. Please include a separate sheet with short biographical and contact information. Media can be emailed as an attachment or accessible by hyperlink.

Please see the full list of author submission guidelines available on the Imaginations Journal website. The Imaginations style sheet is accessible here.

Submission deadline is December 10th, 2020.

We plan to notify contributors as to the status of their submissions by May 2021 at the latest. The special issue is tentatively planned for publication in Fall 2021.


Contact us

Please direct questions and inquiries to issue editors Emily Roehl (e.a.roehl@gmail.com) and Rachel W. Jekanowski (rjekanowski@mun.ca).