Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies

Mechademia 6: User Enhancement

Mechademia’s last call for papers produced such a strong response that the editors have decided to extend our discussion of fans and fan practices across two volumes: Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies, will appear in 2010, to be followed in 2011 by Mechademia 6: User Enhancement.

Volume 5 will focus on the spaces, activities, identities, and ideas that are part of the construction we call “otaku” or “fan,” while volume six will take the conversation one step further by examining alterations fans have effected in themselves through the enactment and reception of various performances and processes—alterations that have become part of their identities as fans.

Submissions for volumes 5 and 6 are now closed.

Mechademia 7: Lines of Sight

The critique of Cartesian perspectivalism has had a profound impact on art history and criticism, film studies, critical theory, and philosophies of the body and experience. Critics have called attention to how Cartesian ideals of rational universal knowledge were reinforced by, and grounded in, an insistence on linear or one-point perspective in the visual arts. Cartesian perspectivalism thus became the dominant mode for visuality and knowledge in the modern era, extending the hegemony of the modern rational subject to arts as diverse as painting, photography and cinema, and to knowledge of nature, the human body, and experience.

The critique of Cartesian perspectivalism also has a long history in Japan, from a phenomenological emphasis on the lived experience of the body in prewar philosophy to Azuma Hiroki’s recent claim that superflat art and manga present a total break with Cartesianism.

Today, where the hegemony of Cartesian perspectivalism once seemed everywhere in evidence and called for incessant critique, we instead encounter perceptual modes and knowledge formations that are seemingly non-Cartesian ― in manga, video games, animation, fan activities, media art, information technologies, social theory, and in philosophies and sciences of embodiment. We now confront the question of how to address and evaluate the implications of these new modalities of perception and knowledge in arts and theories.

Thus we propose ‘Lines of Sight.’ In keeping with our mission to forge links between different communities of knowledge and to challenge the conventional channels for flows of information, in Mechademia 7, we invite contributors to explore both the critique of Cartesianism and the emergence of non-Cartesian modalities ― the vectors of perception that traverse audio-visual fields, with the emergence of subjective effects rather than perceptual positions or fixed identities.

The submission deadline for volume 7 has been extended to January 3, 2011.

Download the Mechademia Style Guide (vers. 3.8, June 2009) – pdf format

Mechademia essays may be up to 5,000 words, plus citations. Shorter pieces are also welcome, and we will consider submissions in creative, non-traditional formats as well.

Mechademia uses Chicago style documentation. Accepted pieces must be revised to conform with the citation and romanization guidelines in the Mechademia Style Guide, which can be downloaded from the link on this page.

Mechademia encourages authors to include relevant illustrations, up to five black-and-white images per article. Color images may be possible with special permission from the publisher. In the case of copyrighted images or other copyrighted material, it is the author’s responsibility to obtain permission to reproduce the material, but authors need not have these permissions in hand at the submission stage. Note that screen grabs from films and anime, book covers and manga covers, and ephemera (including advertising) are considered fair use by the publisher; authors need not and should not seek permissions for these things.

Articles should be submitted in electronic form, as Microsoft Word (1997-2004 format), RTF, or PDF documents. Email these as attachments to submissions AT mechademia.org. Files larger than 5 MB should be sent through a file transmission service like http://www.mediafire.com.

For questions about the submissions process

Please contact:
Wendy Goldberg
Submissions Editor
submissions AT mechademia.org

For other inquiries:

Please contact:
Frenchy Lunning,
Editor-in-Chief, Mechademia
frenchy AT mechademia.org