[Discussion] Identifying New Media

[Gonul]

Post Identity, a national, fully-refereed journal of the humanities,
publishes
scholarship that problematizes the narratives underlying individual,
social, and
cultural identity formations; that investigates the relationship between

identity formations and texts; and that argues how such formations can
be
challenged.

Increasingly we, our contributors, and our readers are finding that the
most
powerful of these cultural formations and their most provocative
critical
challenges are combining text, images, and sound: we use to watch films;
we now
consume DVD assemblages of multiple cuts, interviews, and games. We use
to only
print our work; we now are publishing web sites that embed that work in
multimedia settings.

In response to these cultural and disciplinary changes, Post Identity
has
partnered with the University of Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office
to
transform itself into an audio-, graphic-, and video-enhanced web-based
journal
that can make available the new forms and subjects of contemporary
critiques of
identity, as well as more traditional text-based scholarship.

The theme for our Winter 2003 special issue is “Identifying New Media.”
We are
looking for submissions that theorize how new media forms (DVDs;
e-books;
Internet blogs, digital archives, interactive gaming; etc.) are changing

cultural and academic understandings of identity and authorship, and/or
how new
media might provide models for new forms of scholarship. We especially
are
interested in experimental work that performs its theory, such as essays
or
projects that offer alternative models to the standard academic essay.
We are
interested in the relationship between the form and content of academic
discourse, and the ways in which this discourse might evolve in light of
the new
media scene.

We invite the immediate submission of 300-word abstracts of essays and
other
academic projects on this theme. We encourage submissions from a variety
of
theoretical perspectives and from all disciplines for which the critique
of
identity is of vital and central concern. Final essays/projects should
fall
within the range of 3,000 to 10,000 words and will be due September 30,
2003.

Please submit abstracts to Professor Rosemary Weatherston at
weatherr@udmercy.edu. Past print issues of Post Identity are available
until
September 2003 at http://liberalarts.udmercy.edu/pi/. The new web-based
format
of PI is under construction at http://www.hti.umich.edu/p/postid/.

Editorial Board

Houston A. Baker, Jr. • M. Keith Booker • Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang •
Benjamin
Click • Anne DeWindt • Edwin DeWindt • S. E. Gontarski • Arnold Krupat •
Luis
Leal • Wayne Lesser • Paul Lorenz • Lev Manovich • Carla Mulford •
Judith Roof •
Werner Sollors • Molly Abel Travis • James D. Wallace • Jeffrey A.
Weinstock •
Christina Zwarg


Professor Rosemary Weatherston
Department of English
University of Detroit Mercy
4001 W. McNichols Road
P.O. Box 19900
Detroit, MI 48219-0900
Phone: 313/993-1083
Fax: 313/993-1166