CALL FOR ARTICLES | MEDIA & JORNALISMO: TWENTY YEARS (closed)

Editors: Carla Baptista (NOVA FCSH / ICNOVA, Portugal), Marisa Torres da Silva (NOVA FCSH / ICNOVA, Portugal), Alberto Pena Rodriguez (Universidade de Vigo, / CEIS20, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal)

Article submission deadline: April 30, 2022
Expected publication date: November 2022

The journal Media & Jornalismo turns 20! In these two decades, in which new technologies and forms of digital communication have developed processes of revolutionary transformation, the journal has managed to consolidate itself as a peer-reviewed publication indexed in some of the most relevant international databases. Many dozens of national and foreign researchers have collaborated in it, making it a medium for scientific debate that aspires to achieve the maximum accuracy and quality in the publication of each new issue since its foundation in 2002.

We are thus celebrating the date with a special issue dedicated to critical thinking about the contribution of media studies and journalism to the understanding of the social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics since then. The call is open for original and systematized contributions on the complex modalities of the tantalizing relationship between media and society. We want to promote a critical edition, able to historicize the academic thought in this field of studies, to debate with new insights the identified problems, and to project creative and engaging solutions for the future.

Media & Jornalismo was the first Portuguese academic journal to systematically publish pioneering research in the field of communication sciences. Maintaining the initial focus of being a qualified discussion space to understand the social and political dynamics activated by the media and journalism in contemporary societies, this special issue cannot fail to signal the transformations in the objects of study and theories.

In the first two decades of the second millennium, society has become datafied, and new conglomerates of production and circulation of the symbolic reign. Structured on a technical infrastructure that fulfills the dream and nightmare of technological determinists, machines have become intelligent. People adjectivize politics as "disruptive" and "extreme", journalism has almost disappeared, public spheres have become privatized and maintained ongoing dynamics of fragmentation, activisms are digital, and algorithmic programming capitalizes on the spheres that most characterize the human and the post-human: intimacy, affections, emotions.

The new media, networks and digital communication tools have not only transformed our way of perceiving and telling reality, but also the structure of social relations, the circulation of information between broadcasters and audiences in any context, the commercial exchange between producers and consumers, the debate between political, social, economic and cultural agents in public spaces, the production and dissemination routines of audiovisual content, the way of conceptually representing the world around us and, in short, also ways of feeling, thinking and living.

We are witnessing, in fact, the birth of a new society, in which technological innovation associated to the cyber world, the virtuality of narratives and their robotized viralization are some of the characteristics of this great digital earthquake that shakes the foundations on which the productive system of modern communication is based, affecting in particular the traditional media, in the emergence of a new transmedia panorama in which classic journalism and serious and rigorous informative discourse have lost their protagonism in the simplification of communication models that trivialize or disregard the reality of facts or promote disinformation and propaganda at the service of manipulative causes that pervert the democratizing meaning of the Internet and social networks.

In this special issue of Media & Jornalismo, we want to reflect in an interdisciplinary and multi-methodological way on the ruptures and permanencies that most mark the last 20 years of production, distribution, sharing, and reception of journalistic and media content by differentiated and globalized audiences. Thus, we encourage (but not exclusively) the submission of proposals focused on the following themes:

- Contemporary challenges for theories of journalism and media;
- Disruptive phenomena in the digital age: disinformation, hate speech, populism;
- Media and social conflicts;
- Media and digital activisms;
- Social uses of communication technologies;
- New forms of political and citizen participation;
- Critical, historical views or case studies on media as cultural technologies;
- Essays on media figurations in physical and/or symbolic territories;
- Languages in communication;
- Mediatization processes
- Media influences in the construction of collective memory and social identities;
- Media, racism and sexism;
- Reflections on the future of media and journalism;
- Teaching and training in the field of media and journalism;
- The media arts in the contemporary landscape.

 

KEY DATES

Article submission deadline: April 30, 2022
Editors’ decision on articles: June 2022
Expected publication date: November 2022

Media & Jornalismo (RMJ) is a peer-reviewed and Scopus indexed journal that uses a double blind review process. After submission, each paper will be distributed to two reviewers, previously invited to evaluate it, in terms of its academic quality, originality and relevance to the objectives and scope of the theme chosen for the journal’s current issue. Articles can be submitted in English, Spanish or Portuguese.

Manuscripts must be submitted via the journal’s website (https://impactum-journals.uc.pt/mj). If you are accessing the RMJ for the first time, please register in order to submit your article. Please check the Conditions for submission and Instructions to authors.

For further information, please contact: patriciacontreiras@fcsh.unl.pt