Media Fields Journal Seeks Inaugural Submissions
Media Fields Journal,
http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org/
Inaugural Issue: Video Stores Call for Papers / Projects / Interviews:
Please submit by August 15, 2010
This special issue pays overdue attention to the space of the video store as
a site of inquiry for media and cultural studies.
We seek a wide range of works (medium–length essays of 1500–2500 words,
digital art projects, audio/video interviews) that explore the significance
of video stores — how they have (or have not) figured in film and media
cultures, histories, and theories. In short this issue of Media Fields seeks
contributions that write the video store into film and media studies.
Video stores have been an overwhelmingly neglected topic in film and media
studies. Yet for the past three decades, they have played crucial roles in
shaping the uses, developments, and failures of media technologies; in
sustaining the film industry through the home video market; and in the very
cultivation and distribution of knowledge about cinema itself.
In the past five years, due to a confluence of factors–the Internet’s
emergence as the dominant medium through which we watch media, the
increasing popularity of rental kiosks such as Redbox and online rental
delivery and streaming services such as Netflix, and a troubled economic
climate in which many institutions can no longer afford competitive prices
for rent–video stores have been closing at an alarming rate. The widespread
closures of video stores present an opportunity to consider their social and
cultural significance for a wide range of communities.
We are open to a variety of approaches and topics, which might focus on
industry, technology, globalization, aesthetics, or historiography. Works
might draw on ethnography, anthropology, visual studies, cultural studies,
film studies, media studies, art history, textual analysis, critical theory,
history, sociology, photography, and so forth. We especially welcome works
that engage the role of the video store outside of the dominant media
industries in the United States.
Questions to consider:
- Is the video store an “archive”? How does consideration of the
videostore as a space contribute to or alter any of the many
conversations in
media studies about the “archive”?
- Has the “era” of the video rental store passed? What legacies has it
left? What fallacies might such a claim risk? In what forms do
storesremain or even flourish?
- What is the significance of “renting” in terms of how we perceive media
as commodity, in how we perceive various media technologies, or in how we
perceive the space of the video store?
- How do renting practices connect with old and new forms of distribution
and consumer practices?
- What kinds of knowledges about cinema has the video store as a space
shaped? How might consideration of the video store revise film canons,
film histories, video histories, cultural histories, media histories?
- To what extent is the video store, as some media scholars have claimed,
a model for the Internet, in its bringing into contact, and keeping alive
networks of cultural commodities? How does the Internet represent the end of
or the continuation of the video store?
- What relationships exist between piracy and the video rental store?
- How has the video store functioned in relation to other media practices
and cultural forms—from music and gaming to fan clubs, snacks and
collectibles?
- To what extent can particular video rental stores be read as marking
and traversing regional, national, and global boundaries and flows?
Feel free to contact issue co–editors, Joshua Neves and Jeff Scheible, with
proposals and inquiries.
submissions@mediafieldsjournal.org
