Colleagues, With all due apologies for cross-posting: Call for Papers: Special Issue of Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture The Host City: (Re)Locating Media Events in the Network Era Guest Editor: Robert Moses Peaslee, Texas Tech University Assistant Guest Editor: Brendan Kredell, University of Calgary As media events (Couldry, Hepp & Krotz, 2010; Dayan & Katz,1992) of all stripe proliferate around the world, a variety of stakeholdersjockey for position and advantage in the geographical and cultural contextschosen to host them. Media events, as Dayan and Katz famously characterizedthem, were defined in part by their liveness, their physical remoteness from the majority of their “audience,” their interruptive nature, and their status, nonetheless, as pre-planned (prominent examples today would include the Olympic games, the annual film festival at Cannes, the Super Bowl, and music festivals such as Chicago’s Lollapalooza). Many of these events are consistently located, well-established and have assumed a defensive position aimed at maintainingbrand identity and prestige. Others, such as the Olympics, change locations, while others (such as Austin, TX’s Fantastic Fest) are ascendant, and still others are nascent at best. Each host community, however, has a unique relationship to their event(s), and each of these relationships provides fertile ground for investigating the role of media events in promoting discourses of community identity, establishing infrastructural and externalnetworks, reifying the importance of being mediated, utilizing the "local” to speak "globally,” and a variety of other processes. This special issue of Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture seeks research articles engaging the media events literature and investigating the relationship between event and location, between location-as-text and location-as-infrastructure, between location and audience, between location and industry, and other relevant relationships, all in the context of networked media structures. Some relevant topics areas include, but are by no means limited to: Host city branding and image management Networked media events: the impact of social media Media events and host city governance Discourses of place in the media event “Thereness” and virtuality in the media event Media events as sites of resistance Community and ritual Media events, promotion and (g)local media Fannish practices in/around the media event The political economy of the media event The audience experience: affect, memory, place Media events and mobility Comparative analyses of host cities in media event contexts Prospective authors should submit an abstract of approximately 500 words no later than January 15, 2013 to robert.peaslee@ttu.edu<mailto:robert.peaslee@ttu.edu>. Abstracts will be reviewed by the editors on a rolling basis until then. Those authors whose abstracts are accepted will be required to submit full articles of 6000-7000 words (inclusive of notes, appendices, and works cited) no later than March 15, 2013. Full articles will be subject to a blind peer-review process, meaning that acceptance of an abstract does not denote acceptance of the full article. We anticipate accepting approximately 12 abstracts in order to produce an issue of 6-7 articles. Any revisions required by the reviewers will be expected by mid-June in order to publish the issue in early 2014. Authors wishing to propose relevant book reviews for the issue should also submit an abstract by January 15, 2013. Questions and abstracts should be directed to robert.peaslee@ttu.edu<mailto:robert.peaslee@ttu.edu>. Also, anyone interested in serving as a reviewer should send a brief letter of interest along with a CV to bkredell@ucalgary.ca<mailto:bkredell@ucalgary.ca> Thanks and Happy Holidays! Rob ________________________________ Robert Moses Peaslee, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Journalism & Electronic Media College of Media & Communication Texas Tech University Affiliated Faculty - Institute for Hispanic and International Communication Faculty Senate - 2012–2015 TTU Campus Coordinator - Global Lens Film Series Chair - Flatland Film Festival and Series Programming Committee p: 806.834.2562 f: 806.742.1085 robert.peaslee@ttu.edu