The Media Fields Journal: Critical Explorations in Media and Space is seeking submissions for its Twelfth Issue, Media and Migration. Contributors may submit essays (1500-2500 words), digital art projects, and audio or video interviews exploring possible dynamics between media, migration, movement, and space. Submissions should correspond with the themes of this issue (listed below), and all essay submissions must be previously unpublished. Please email all submissions with a brief cover letter to submissions@mediafieldsjournal.org. For more information, see the Media Fields Journal guidelines for submissions.

Submissions should be formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed. Please include a 150-250 word abstract and a 50 word biographical statement in a separate attachment. All filenames should include your last name

“Recent studies demonstrate the need to reassess longstanding assumptions about the connections between media and migration. Carolyn Cartier, Manuel Castells, and Jack Linchuan Qiu challenge the understanding of marginalized communities as “have-nots” who stand outside the information society. Instead, they use the term “have-less” to indicate migrants’ limited and precarious access to media technology. Given the particular challenges to reaching and moving across space that migrants experience, migrants are, as Karim H. Karim demonstrates, at the forefront of technological adoption. In this context, the uprooted migrant has given way to what Dana Diminescu calls the ‘connected migrant.'”

Contributors may address the following questions:

• How do physical media infrastructures condition movements of information and people? Or even the movement of animals, water, or waste?
• What economic, social, or legal frameworks regulate the movement of information, spectrum allocation, information systems, and human migration?
• How is GPS or other tracking technology being taken up by migrants or their opponents?
• How might thinking about physical or digital migration of information, media devices, or technologies shed new light on how we approach the movement of people across space?
• Does the way information move within systems or across borders provide a nuanced way to rethink human migration, immigration laws, and border enforcement?
• How does the migration of media and people influence ideas about the global, national, and post-national?
• How do media technologies influence the formation of transnational communities, online communities, and networks for the marketing and consumption of nostalgia?
• How do media technologies and social media alter processes, communication, and economic experiences of migration for migrants as well as those “left behind”?
• What role does media play for migrants resettling in a host nations and navigating new cultural, political, and physical surroundings? How does settlement in the host country affect migrants’ relationship to media?
• Do gender, sexuality, race, and class differences influence migrants’ access to media technologies? Or the way they use these technologies? How might this contribute to diverging experiences of migration?
• What effects do media technologies have on the relationship between migration and the gendered distribution of paid and unpaid care work?
• What methodological questions or issues emerge in understanding this moment of intensifying movement of both people and information across the national borders and through media infrastructures?

All submissions must be sent to submissions@mediafieldjournal.org by January 15, 2016.

Any questions may be sent to co-editorsBianka Ballina and Carlos Jimenez.