Media Theory publishes guest-edited special issues on particular themes as well as standard issues of unrelated articles.
We are particularly keen to receive submissions from authors from the global south, and work informed by feminist theory, queer theory, and critical race theory.
If an article is submitted in response to a call for papers for a specific special issue, it will be received and dealt with by the guest editor(s) in liaison with the journal editor, and should be emailed directly to the guest editor(s). All other unsolicited submissions are received and dealt with by the journal editor, and should be emailed directly to the journal editor.
Articles should generally contain between 6,000 and 8,000 words (including all notes and references), though we are reasonably flexible.
Articles should contain an abstract (approx. 150 words), keywords (approx. 5), and (in the final, accepted version) a short biographical note and email address for each author (approx. 1-5 lines per author).
All submissions to Media Theory are double-blind peer-reviewed (meaning that the identity of both authors and reviewers are known only to the editors), so contributors should take care to remove any obvious indications of authorship; when citing your own work, replace your name with ‘Author’ in both the body of the text and in the references. For details of our peer-review process, see here.
Articles should be submitted in English. Authors who wish to submit an article in another language should contact the editor first at: simon.dawes@mediatheoryjournal.org
Images: If images are to be included, please ensure:
- That there are no copyright issues that are not covered by ‘fair use’.
- Supply copyright owner’s name and a brief caption.
- Image resolution should be 300dpi.
The journal uses the Harvard referencing system. All submissions should be in this format. It is the author’s responsibility to ensure that this referencing style is used. Embedded quotations should be in double quote marks. Ellipses added by article author to a quotation should be in square brackets: […]. In-text citations should be in this format: (Stiegler, 1998: 54). For an example of how to present the list of references, see below or browse our previously published articles.
Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology (trans. G.C. Spivak). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hall, S. (1977) ‘Culture, Media, and the “Ideological Effect”’, in: J. Curran, M. Gurevitch and J. Woollacott, eds., Mass Communication and Society. London: Edward Arnold, pp.315-348.
Hall, S. (1986) ‘Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms’, in: R. Collins, J. Curran, N. Garnham, P. Scannell, P. Schlesinger and C. Sparks, eds., Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader. London: Sage, pp.33-48.
Hall, S. (1996) ‘The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees’, in: D. Morley and K. Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, pp.25-46.
Kittler, F. (2009) ‘Towards an Ontology of Media’, Theory, Culture & Society 26(2-3): 23-31.
McLuhan, M. (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: Toronto University Press.
Morley, D. (2009) ‘For a Materialist, Non-Media-Centric Media Studies’, Television & New Media, 10(1), pp.114-116.
Papacharissi, Z. (2014) Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parks, L. & C. Kaplan (Eds.) (2017) Life in the Age of Drone Warfare. London and Durham: Duke University Press.
Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. R. Beardsworth and G. Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Williams, R. (1974) Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge.
Special Issue Proposals
Proposals should also be sent to the journal editor. They should contain a brief outline of the aims and scope of the issue, clearly situating the project within the relevant literature and emphasising the relevance to the aims and scope of the journal, as well as names and short biographies of the editors and at least some of the proposed contributors, and draft titles and abstracts for their articles. Issues based on conferences or other events are encouraged, but we tend to prefer a mix of solicited articles and those submitted in response to a call for papers. Special issues should be international and interdisciplinary, and contain contributions from authors from multiple institutions.
All proposals are considered by the editorial board in its entirety (and occasionally by some members of the advisory board). The editor will respond with a decision and informal feedback from board members within 2 weeks. Successful proposals will be guest edited by the issue editors, who will have full control over the peer-review process and editing of the issue (in liaison with the journal editors if necessary).
Website Submission Guidelines
In addition to publishing full-length, peer-reviewed articles in the journal, Media Theory also publishes other types of content on its website. This includes reviews of books, conferences, exhibitions, artworks, films and games, as well as interviews, short essays, photo-essays and videos.
Written texts should follow the same referencing convention as the journal. Ideally, such texts should be roughly 1,000-2,000 words long.
If you are interested in submitting such a text to the website, please contact the journal editor.