Past Call for Essays

Volume 2 Issue 1 (January 2010) (CLOSED)
Reporting Conflict: Between Objectivity, Subjectivity, and Agency

Conflict reporting necessitates the (re)presentation of sides. News (re)presentation of clashing sides are shaped by subjective notions of 'good' and 'evil', of 'justice' and 'injustice' – one person's 'terrorist' is another person's 'freedom fighter'. Yet within culturally and politically defined versions of reality, the news media is expected to uphold the journalistic principal of 'objectivity', of not allowing cultural or political biases to colour the facts.

Yet, the presentation of conflict - whether in reporting body counts, or in covering battle tactics, or in editorialising mediation efforts - necessitates the subjective selection of a reporting angle in order to construct an 'accurate' 'representation' of the conflict. And when journalists and news organizations place a premium on 'getting the story out' in order to 'make a difference', subjectivity begins to resemble human agency.

How then, do we differentiate between objective news, subjective frames, and the manifestation of human agency? Is it ethical to report conflict through the hard lens of objectivity? When does agency transform into bias, or into propaganda?

Volume 2 Issue 1 explores news representation of conflict, probing the objective, the subjective, and agency.

Volume 1 (July 2009) (CLOSED)
Mediated Mobilities: Negotiating Identities

Globalisation is transforming conventional concepts of human mobility - by not only intensifying its scale, reach, and normality, but also catalysing new modes of identity and restructuring relationships of power.

Geographical mobility represents one important dimension of contemporary globalising mobilities. Describing the physical movement of individuals and communities from one place to another, this form of mobility encompasses the lived realities and increasingly realisable possibilities of migration, travel, and translocal commute; rituals of gathering and dispersal; as well as meanings of coming and going.

On another closely related level is social mobility, where movement is associated with forms of inclusion and exclusion across certain networks as well as experiences of (non- and dis-)identification in relation to particular social categories.

However, what is particularly distinct about the contemporary globalising world is mediated mobility. Mobility is not just enacted through media use and across media spaces. More often (and more importantly!), it is performatively shaped through practices of media and technology. As mobility is represented and reflected through media, it is influenced through it. Occurring to various degrees of ephemerality and permanence, this dimension of mobility (re)configures social discourses to various extents of (ir)reversibility.

For example, a rising use of convergent mobile and immobile media as well as non-digital and digital communication technologies facilitates both the intensification and fragmentation of interaction between individuals and communities worldwide. These inform the negotiations of identity across multiple and dispersed public spheres, privileging particular modes of being over others.

In addition to general articles in the field of Media and Communication, PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication welcomes for its inaugural volume thematic submissions exploring "Mediated Mobilities: Negotiating Identities" in areas such as: