Media Fields Journal
UCSB Media Fields research collective
The Media Fields research collective formed at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2007 to advance scholarship on the spatial aspects of a range of media forms, including film, television, radio, and digital media.
“Media Fields” encompasses research on representations of space in media, as well as on spatial and environmental characteristics of media forms and practices. We are interested in critical investigations of the many other dimensions of the term “field,” such as its methodological, disciplinary, and epistemological configurations. The collective has convened four successful conferences: the 2007 conference brought together media scholars and practitioners to reflect upon how their projects related to the idea of the “field;” the 2009 conference showcased research on media infrastructures; the 2011 conference explored “contested territories,” both physical and conceptual, where media meets struggle; and the 2013 conference, access/trespass, provided a forum to discuss the deployment of power over space both by hegemonic institutions and by activists and individuals attempting to thwart the policing of borders and space
Media Fields Journal is a platform for the dissemination of current research on the spatial dimensions of media, opening up new critical directions that account for the changing roles that different media forms play in the world today. “Media Fields” is a conceptual catalyst for rethinking relationships between national, transnational, and global boundaries and flows; language, leisure, and law; theory and practice; space and time; place and space; networks and infrastructures; and the many complicated ways in which various media forms cross paths. Drawing on the unique qualities of an online format, the journal is public and open access, inviting and soliciting submissions from researchers, practitioners, and artists from various fields. It will distribute medium-length scholarly essays on timely and provocative themes, and it will include works that are not typically found in traditional academic print journals, such as photo essays and audio interviews. The journal’s aim is to circulate research on media and space, to function as a testing ground for new disciplinary trajectories, and to facilitate conversations that advance space, spatiality, and critical practice as crucial topics in the field of media studies.