[ Call for Papers ]

To mark the occasion of the move of spacesofidentity.net to an Open Journal System, there will be a special issue:

Special Issue of spacesofidentity.net
Digitizing Central Europe: Alternative Media and Spaces of Identity

In the post-Soviet and new-EU member-state imaginaries of contemporary Central Europe, digital media and technologies such as weblogs, internet-based social networking, text messaging, internet radio etc. have played a significant role in mediating and re-signifying public spheres and constructing public homes that negotiate, and often express an ambivalent relationship with, national, supra-national, urban and global spaces of identity.

While often inviting participatory forms of engagement with public issues and blurring the boundaries between civic, journalistic and academic engagement, the  complex, opaque and skill-demanding new mediascape of blogging, Web 2.0 and flash mobs has also opened up a “digital divide” based not only on affluence but also on age, gender and language. This asynchronicity of participation has produced nationalist and populist backlashes to global and transnational imaginaries, sometimes supported by the more traditional media of radio broadcasts, (national) television and the popular press.

The special issue of spacesofidentity.net invites contributions that explore how contemporary media cultures in Central Europe harness the normalizing and subversive potential of electronic media for critique and identity formation.

 Topics and case studies could include, but are not limited to:
    •     the impact of digital media on civic engagement, academic and journalistic writing
    •     diasporic communities and media cultures
    •     metroblogging, communities of proximity, and urban culture
    •     flash mobs and cultures of resistance
    •     YouTube, documentary, and protest
    •     comments, web polls and populism
    •     social networking, poking and popularity
    •     global Internet English, national languages, and identity formation
    •     Cyrillics, diacritics and power

Contributors are encouraged to keep their submissions to less than 10,000 words. Submissions should not have been previously published in English. All submissions should be accompanied by a 100-word abstract and a brief biographical note including institutional affiliation. References should be given as in-text quotations in parentheses according to MLA style. Full references should be formatted in MLA style and placed at the end of the document after the endnotes, in alphabetical order. Please make sure that any information on your authorship is deleted from the submisson file (including the user info in Word and Acrobat).

spacesofidentity.net is using a double-blind reviewing system, meaning that the identities of both authors and reviewers will be concealed from each other. We ask all authors to provide the contact details (including e-mail addresses) of at least two potential peer reviewers for their manuscript. These should be experts in their field of study, who will be able to provide an objective assessment of the manuscript. Any suggested peer reviewers should not have published with any of the authors of the manuscript within the past five years and should not be members of the same research institution. Members of the Editorial Board of the journal can be nominated. Suggested reviewers will be considered alongside potential reviewers identified.

Please send your submissions to editors@spacesofidentity.net, or submit them via the web interface.

Deadline for manuscript submission: 15 March 2008.