CALL FOR PAPERS A book collection of work on media and cultural history RESIDUAL MEDIA No phrase has been evacuated of meaning, and has outlived its critical usefulness, faster than "new media." If there is a reigning myth of media, it is that technological change necessarily involves the "new." This preoccupation risks neglecting the crucial role of continuity in the historical process. Rather than consisting solely of dramatic rupture, the dynamics of culture bump along unevenly, dragging the familiar into novel contexts. Raymond Williams's attention to emergent, dominant, and residual forms has long alerted us to the varying forces of historical change and to the lacunae that result from examining the emergent in isolation. Residual Media will be a corrective to contemporary scholarship's fetishization of the "new." Papers are sought for this edited collection of interdisciplinary research in cultural history exploring reconfigured, renewed, recycled, disposed, neglected, abandoned, and trashed media technologies and practices. What is the process by which media, and their related devices, texts, objects, spaces and competencies, fade away? How do some - whether in archives or attics, minds or training manuals - become the background for the introduction of other forms? In what manner do they reappear as environmental problems, as the "new" elsewhere, as collectables, as memories, and as art? What are the qualities of our everyday engagement with the half-life of media forms and practices? Residual Media will bring together original scholarly work on these and related issues, combining theoretical essays on the problems of media historiography with studies of specific residual forms, practices and materials. Work may investigate any number of visual, sound, projection, broadcast, and writing technologies. Proposals are due January 15, 2003, preferably sent by email. They will include a 250-word description of the research, a sample bibliography and a one-paragraph author's biography. Send proposals to: Dr. Charles Acland Associate Professor Communication Studies Concordia University 7141 Sherbrooke St. W. Montreal, QC H4B 1R6 Canada Email craclan@alcor.concordia.ca Fax 514-848-4257 Phone for 2002-2003: 612-825-9060