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Mediascape: UCLA’s Journal of Cinema and Media Studies

Published Since: 2005

Philosophy

Our aim is to create a forum which takes an interdisciplinary approach to visual cultural studies. Conceptually, we see this journal as focusing on the moving image and all its manifestations.

We want to endorse a non-exclusive treatment of visual culture and will look for cross-disciplinary, cross-technological, and cross-cultural perspectives of our field to make up the content of the journal.

Our staff includes members of UCLA's School of Film, Television and Digital Media and represents both the field of critical studies, as well as the moving image archive program.

We are interested in the constantly changing face of our field and the places where it crosses over into other disciplines.

Interdisciplinary scholarship brings the issue of vocabulary, terminology, and language in general to the fore.

It is our intent that Mediascape be a place to explore the cross-pollination of perspectives, approaches, media, and culture that make up the ecology of our growing field.

Current Issue

Features

Reviews

Meta

Columns/Videos

Call for Papers

FEATURES

“Features” is seeking articles that consider themes and variations on traversing the local and global mediascape within all areas of media studies.

To understand media today one must examine the global system of media industries, while also taking into account national and local identities and differences. Synergy between local and global communities has surfaced not only in the broader geo-political arena, but in our creation and consumption of media. As a result, the possibility or predicament of local collective identity enculturation within newly established global marketplace presents itself as a primary concern for media scholars. Do global programs eliminate local production? Has the globalization of the media brought about a Westernization of world media systems? How does the role of the internet come into play regarding the relationship between local users and the power of global media corporations?

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Transnational media productions, e.g., How can we conceive of national cinemas in the contemporary media landscape? Are there local or national cinemas anymore? What is the role of local and international film festivals in the global film market?
• The role of state and local institutions in shaping transnational strategies, e.g., How have different local government regulations, such as quotas on imports/exports or censorship, affected the flow of media across nations?
• Global media governance and the migration of intellectual properties between nations, e.g., How are television shows adapted from one country to another such as American Idol or The Office?
• How have new media technologies like the internet and the increased migration of texts across borders impacted the notion of the public sphere?
• The use of advertising and marketing in reaching diverse local and global audiences, e.g., How is a film marketed differently for a domestic US market vs. specific states, cities or regions, as compared to the way it is marketed internationally [...]

REVIEWS

Reviews seeks submissions which analyze discourses that complicate the notion of the local and the global in any medium. The object of review can be a film, a TV program, a website, an architectural design, a book, an artwork, an industry/trade report, an advertisement, a tourist brochure, a piece of hardware, a movie review, an academic conference, merchandise —anything. Because the scope of local and global as a theme encompasses a large spectrum of concepts, it is imperative to distinguish between, and specify, the different scales of the local and global. Subjects that may arise include:

• How has the concept of the local and global evolved over time? E.g., how this concept was originally used as a dichotomy (local/global), but is now increasingly used as mutually dependent construct (local.global).
• How are the national cinema paradigm and locally specific film conventions being complicated today? Consider the attempt to globally market films dealing with local themes and concerns to “art-house” audiences.
• How do communities and/or multinational corporations market themselves to their own perceptions of a local market/audience? For instance, how have schools of visual art often presented themselves in highly strategized ways in internationally-renowned museums? And McDonald’s, for example, adopts slightly altered menus and employs highly different marketing strategies for various regions of the world.
• How is exhibition operated across cultures? Consider how films originally targeted for a mainstream audience in a non-Western nation, often end up either being exhibited only in film festivals or university circuits in the West.
• What are similarities and differences between international gaming cultures and productions? How are video games developed in the US and abroad, and how video games have become a social unifier on a global scale with online gaming technology?
• What are the effects of the increased quality in home theater systems in light of technological advances in and content produced for theatrical 3-D projection and the IMAX format? Consider how these two movements relate to issues of spectatorship.
• How do the local and global coexist and function in, while addressing dimensions of space, both the localized and the dispersed? Consider new architectural works such as Millennium Park in Chicago. [...]

COLUMNS

Documentaries, perhaps more than any other media form, have the ability to highlight the tensions between local cultures and the global community. While bringing an observant eye to underreported issues, documentaries may also raise questions concerning the representation of local/national cultures. This issue of “Columns” seeks short papers (800-1500 words) on the role of documentary filmmaking in the larger framework of local/global.

Topics may or may not address:

• Issues of production and/or collaboration, distribution and exhibition
• Minority and/or cultural expression in documentary
• Effects of globalization on documentary form and aesthetics
• National/local documentaries and issues of nationalism/cultural performance
• Documentary as a political, social and historical agent
• Documentary as memory
• Effects of new media on the documentary form and its ability to communicate local concerns globally
• Journalism and issues of representation
• Virtual essays and documentary scholarship [...]

META

The pursuit of cinema and media scholarship often leaves unexamined questions about the practice of scholarship itself: how we formulate analysis and argument, why certain issues emerge to the fore, what new forms and expressions of media and cultural analysis enhance our understanding. The META section presents students and scholars of cinema and other media the opportunity to publish work that exemplifies scholastic self-awareness—papers and projects that contemplate academic methods, critique their implications and limitations, and propagate new approaches to media scholarship.
As the very name Mediascape invokes a sense of place and space in visual culture, META presents an opportunity to reflect upon the ways we explore the elastic boundaries of the global and the local in student and scholarly work:

• How have the expanding parameters of production, reception and distribution challenged classical definitions of “national,” “international,” and “transnational” for scholars in the field of visual studies today?
• What historical and theoretical methodologies are employed to complicate the apparent dichotomy of local/global?
• How are borders and territories of media scholarship being contested and revised in the turn toward the global while at the same time calling attention to the importance of local specificity?
• What does it mean to do transnational scholarship?
• What does the broad concept of “global village” mean for visual studies and its future; that is, as scholars we often interrogate global media structures but rarely reflect on the notion of a global village of scholars?
• How are spatial geographies mapped onto the study of cinema, television and digital culture that position the object of study but also (re)situate the scholar?
• What are the problems and benefits related to the digitization of local archives, and how have they hindered, improved or facilitated scholarship? [...]

For full online call for papers, visit: http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Submissions.html
For downloadable pdf, click here.

Staff

Editors in Chief
Jennifer Porst
Maya Montañez Smukler
Bryan Hartzheim

Features
Katy Ralko
Michelle Ton

Reviews
James Fleury
Dennis Lo

Columns
Ross Lenihan
Benjamin Sampson

META /strong>
Heather Collette-VanDeraa
Nilo Naraghi

Editorial board

  • Nick Browne - UCLA, Cinema and Media Studies
  • John Caldwell - UCLA, Cinema and Media Studies
  • Teshome Gabriel - UCLA, Cinema and Media Studies
  • James Hay - University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign, Speech Communication
  • David James - USC, Cinematic Arts Critical Studies
  • Henry Jenkins - MIT, Comparitive Media Studies
  • Steve Mamber - UCLA, Cinema and Media Studies
  • Toby Miller - UC Riverside, English/Sociology/Womens Studies
  • Chon Noriega - UCLA, Cinema and Media Studies
  • Lisa Parks - UC Santa Barbara, Film and Media Studies
  • Dana Polan - NYU, Cinema Studies
  • Steven Ricci - UCLA, Cinema and Media Studies
  • Jeffrey Sconce - Northwestern University, Screen Cultures
  • Vivian Sobchack - UCLA, Cinema and Media Studies
  • Lynn Spigel - Northwestern University, Screen Cultures
  • John Bridge - UCLA, Cinema and Media Studies, Co-founder, Mediascape
  • Erin Hill - UCLA, Cinema and Media Studies, Co-founder, Mediascape

Resources

ISSN (Online): 1558-478X

Website: http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape

Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php

Contact

Email: mediascape@tft.ucla.edu

UCLA School of Theatre, Film, and Television
Los Angeles , CA 90095-1622


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