CFP: Screens and Sociotechnical Attachments

Call for papers: Journal Comunicação e Sociedade
Communication and Society Research Centre, University of Minho, Portugal

Special Issue: Screens and Sociotechnical Attachments

Screens as designed interfaces play a central role in the 21st century digital era: they mediate our daily activities, shape our cultural and technological imagination, and have an undeniable human significance. In this issue of Communication and Society on ‘Screens and sociotechnical attachments”, we are especially interested in computer screens, cinema and video screens, screens incorporated in urban spaces, as well as on those that are wearable. We focus on these kinds of screens and related information technologies and ask what its implications might be for the way people communicate and interact in private and public spaces.

Areas that might be explored under this general concern include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

- the many different roles of “screen”,
- the changing concepts of the screen or its social history;
- the presence of screens in the urban landscape, their implications for shared engagement and social experience;
- the interactions between “old” semiotic resources and new technologies;
- the way screens shape perception and the logic of visual reading:
- the play out between visibility and invisibility;
- the discourses that are a part of screens experiences;
- the embodied and social nature of pleasures, as well as of the “pains” associated with screens.

In this issue we especially encourage essays, but empirically-based papers will be accepted as long as their results are considered theoretically relevant.

Comunicação e Sociedade is a peer reviewed journal and operates a double-blind reviewing process. Once a paper has been submitted it is distributed to two reviewers who are asked to assess it on its individual merits according to academic quality, originality and relevance to the aims and scope of this issue.

Manuscripts should be sent by email as a Word attachment to j.pinheiro.neves@gmail.com by the 31st January 2010. Notification of acceptance decisions will be communicated via email by the beginning of March 2010.

See editorial and Manuscript Submission Guidelines.

Working languages: Portuguese, Spanish and English

This issue on ‘Screens and Sociotechnical Attachments” will be published by July 2010.