Call for Papers: M/C Journal 'home' Issue

It's that time of the bimester - we're calling for papers for issue 10.4 of M/C Journal:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 30 April 2007

M/C - Media and Culture
http://www.media-culture.org.au/
is calling for contributors to the 'home' issue of

M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

M/C Journal is looking for new contributors. M/C is a crossover journal between the popular and the academic, and a blind- and peer-reviewed journal. In 2007, M/C Journal celebrates its tenth year in publication.

To see what M/C Journal is all about, check out our Website, which contains all the issues released so far, at <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/>. To find out how and in what format to contribute your work, visit <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/journal/submission.php>.

Call for Papers: 'home'
Edited by Andrew Gorman-Murray and Robyn Dowling

Home is emotive and powerful. A basic desire for many, home is saturated with the meanings, memories, emotions, experiences and relationships of everyday life. Long neglected as a focus of academic scrutiny, interest in home and domesticity is now growing apace across the humanities and social sciences. In this issue of M/C Journal we contribute to these critical voices, further untangling the intricate and multi-layered connections between home and everyday life in the contemporary world.

Home is ambiguous and multi-faceted. For many, home is a place of belonging, intimacy, security, relationship and selfhood. Many draw their sense of self, their identity, through an investment in their home, whether as house, hometown or homeland. But simultaneously, home is not always a well-spring of succour and goodness, and others experience alienation, rejection, hostility, danger and fear 'at home'. Home can be a site of domestic violence or 'house arrest'; young gay men and lesbians may feel alienated in the family home; asylum seekers are banished from their homelands; indigenous peoples are often dispossessed of their homelands.

Home is complex and multi-scalar. For many, house and home are conflated, so that a sense of home is coterminous with a physical dwelling structure. For others, home is signified by intimate familial or community relationships which extend beyond the residence and stretch across a neighbourhood. Without contradiction, we can speak of hometowns and homelands, so that home can be felt at the scale of the town, city, region or nation. For others - international migrants and refugees, global workers, communities of mixed descent - home can be stretched into transnational belongings.

'Home is thus a spatial imaginary: a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings, which are related to context, and which construct places, extend across spaces and scales, and connects places' (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 2). This issue of M/C Journal seeks papers responding to these prompts. Many of these themes find resonance in various media forms within and beyond Australia, including suburban dramas (Neighbours, Desperate Housewives, The Secret Life of Us), lifestyle and reality television (Renovation Rescue, The Block, Border Security), film (The Castle, Floating Life, Rabbit-Proof Fence), magazines (Australian Vogue Living, Better Homes and Gardens), as well as life writing, novels, art and public debates about immigration and Australian values. Possible themes include: domestic lifestyling and material cultures; homemaking and identity; neighbour(hood)s; domopolitics and homeland security; indigenous and nationalist politics of home and belonging; transnational homemaking; diaspora and homing desires.

Submit papers of 3,000 words in length to the editors at home@journal.media-culture.org.au.

Article deadline: 29 June 2007
Issue release date: 22 August 2007

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. Contributors are directed to past issues of M/C Journal for examples of style and content, and to the submissions page for comprehensive article submission guidelines. M/C Journal articles are blind peer-reviewed.

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Further M/C Journal issues scheduled for 2007:

'error': article deadline 24 August 2007, release date 17 October 2007
'vote': article deadline 19 October 2007, release date 12 December 2007

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M/C - Media and Culture is located at <http://www.media-culture.org.au/>.

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M/C Journal is online at <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/>.
All past issues of M/C Journal on various topics are available there.

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