CFP: The Media and the Military

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CFP: The Media and the Military

The Sage journal Media, Culture and Society (http://mcs.sagepub.com/) calls for proposed contributions to a planned themed issue with the working title ‘The Media and the Military’, co-edited by Katy Parry and John Corner. Military involvement in, and use of, media flows, including forms of social media, has developed significantly in the last decade. In relation to this, media strategies have developed too, with consequences both for military-political relations and military-civilian relations. New lines of visibility and emphasis have emerged alongside continuing strands of the invisible or marginalised.  An indication of the agenda of questions the issue proposes to address would include:

  • How do unfolding narratives concerning the military sphere become interconnected with questions of foreign policy and what do these interconnections tell us about wider political debates on military-civil relations?
  • How are ‘costs’ (diplomatic, economic and human, including forms of mental and physical injury) variously calculated in relation to the mediation of military activity?
  • Do vernacular expressions of recent military experience (e.g. in social media, memoirs, forums) challenge or complement official accounts? How do they relate to the politics of ‘the war on terror’?
  • How are national histories variously put to work or displaced in the mediation of contemporary military action?
  • What evidence is available about the ways in which public perceptions of the military are constructed, about the tensions at work in that construction and about shifts in evaluation?


Proposals should be a maximum of 400 words and indicate not only the proposed topic but the kinds of approach, methods and forms of illustration/documentation/data to be employed. Proposals for shorter items (including discussion pieces) as well as for conventional length articles (max 8,000 words) are welcomed. The deadline for receipt is 20 September 2015. Proposals should be emailed to John Corner (J.R.Corner@leeds.ac.uk<mailto:J.R.Corner@leeds.ac.uk>) and Katy Parry (K.J.Parry@leeds.ac.uk<mailto:K.J.Parry@leeds.ac.uk>). Selection for invitations to submit first draft papers in the following year will follow within 6 weeks of the proposal deadline, along with details of the planned schedule.