Aether Call for Papers: Landscape, History, and the Media

Call for papers for Aether: the Journal of Media Geography

Guest Editors: Christina Dando and Eric Olmanson

Geography has long had a relationship with the media, from Friedrich Ratzel?s training as a journalist to our complicated relationship with National Geographic. Geographers have used, for many years, newspaper and other media to explore both past and present constructions of places and peoples. This special issue of Aether seeks to expand work at the nexus of history, media, and landscape.

The media plays an important role in communicating as well as shaping our knowledge of our world (Craine 2007; Schwartz and Ryan 2006). This communication can take a wide varie ty of forms when it comes to media and history. It can be the ways in which the media constructs history (i.e., movies, History Channel, coverage of historic sites) and so creates and communicates imaginative historical geographies. It may be the imaginative geographies embedded in media accounts from the past (i.e. place descriptions in tourism magazines, in newspapers, on television), providing a window on how particular places, peoples, and events were constructed at specific points in history. But it can also be the ways in which geographers/historians/artists/etc. use media to communicate/construct/illuminate history and landscape (i.e. art, websites,).

We invite papers that explore all the possibilities that landscape, history, and the media invite: Historical Geography through the Media, Historical Geography of the Media, Historical and Media Landscapes, Historical Media Landscapes, etc. We welcome papers that engage some aspect of landscape, history and the media and that not only explore this intersection but push the boundaries and expand historical geographer's work and engagement with media. Given Aether?s digital form, we encourage and welcome work that may involve not only images and graphics but also audio and/or video.

Timetable:
250 word proposals due: 1 August 2009
Authors notified of acceptance or declined: 1 Septe mber 2009
Full papers due: 1 November 2009

Please direct all questions and submissions to either:

Christina Dando
cdando@mail.unomaha.edu
OR
Eric Olmanson
eolmanso@gmail.com