Themed Section: Reading, Readers and Digital Media
Co-edited by Danielle Fuller (University of Birmingham, UK) and DeNel Rehberg Sedo (Mount Saint Vincent U, Canada)
This themed section of approx. 8 articles will focus on recent and current work investigating the various ways that individual and groups of readers (who may be readers of books or magazines or other formally print genres and/or born-digital material) use or engage with digital media. ‚Digital media‘ here is intended in its broadest sense, to encompass medium, texts, platforms etc.
While we invite scholars working on reading studies and reception from all disciplines and from all parts of the world, we particularly seek articles from work investigating readers in Asia, Africa, continental Europe, Latin and South America. We seek articles which tackle problems of method or methodology as well as those which are case-study based. Suggested topics might include:-
- New media, new challenges, new methods?
- The ethics of investigating readers and reading spaces online
- Intersectionality, reading reception and digital media
- Reading and digital media as a form of social justice/as political engagement
- Algorithms, economics, and the commercialisation of readers’ responses and audiences of readers
- The uses and/or abuses of reading devices (mobile and/or static)
- The politics of access to digital media and reading
- Fan readers and reading fandoms
- Publishers’ relationships with readers online
- Readers and transmedia texts
Articles will be published in English. The editors of Participations are happy to publish an additional abstract in another language, where this will be of assistance to authors and expected audiences. We recognise that writing in English can be a challenge for authors who are not native English speakers. Editors will help, where they can, with details of English expression, but we retain the right either to copy-edit submissions for language issues before confirming acceptance of a submission, or to ask authors to arrange for this to be done by a native speaker through their own connections.
Submissions to the Journal may be of any length. As an online Journal, we are pleased to be able to work without the restrictions inevitably imposed on print Journals. We are willing to entertain submissions which go beyond the usual 6-8,000 limit that other Journals have to impose – providing that the additional space is used to make accessible such things as: the contexts within the research is set; the methodologies used (and their limits); the evidential base; and the implications for other related bodies of work/fields.
Expressions of interest for the ‘Reading, Readers and Digital Media’ themed section consisting of a 200-word abstract, article title and 1 page CV including relevant publications should be emailed to: BeyondTheBookInfo@gmail.com by 30 November 2017. Full articles will be due: 1 May 2018. Participations employs an open peer-review process. The publication date for this themed section is May 2019.
