Communication Culture & Critique

CCC provides an international forum for critical research in communication, media, and cultural studies. We welcome high-quality research and analyses that place questions of power, inequality, and justice at the center of empirical and theoretical inquiry. CCC seeks to bring a diversity of critical approaches (political economy, feminist analysis, critical race theory, postcolonial critique, cultural studies, queer theory) to bear on the role of communication, media, and culture in power dynamics on a global scale. CCC is especially interested in critical scholarship that engages with emerging lines of inquiry across the humanities and social sciences. We seek to explore the place of mediated communication in current topics of theorization and cross-disciplinary research (including affect, branding, posthumanism, labor, temporality, ordinariness, and networked everyday life, to name just a few examples). In the coming years, we anticipate publishing special issues on these themes. Questions and concerns of globalization and transnationalism grew even more urgent in an age of the global digital network society. CCC welcomes international scholarship that theorizes mediated communication as part of a series of migratory and mobile circuits, markets, cultures, and connections that complicate conventional maps of state boundaries and the geography of disciplines. This includes scholarship on global marketing and cultural dynamics, and the extent to which these dynamics are increasingly unsettled by shifting flows of culture and capital. CCC seeks to understand and interrogate the changing mediascape and its place in global societies. However, we are less interested in the rhetorical analysis of singular texts or the properties of any particular medium than we are in the complex role of media culture in wider historical, economic, cultural, and political dynamics. At the same time, digital media convergence and emerging practices (such as the rise of #blacklivesmatter and other forms of hashtag activism) present a crucial context for scholars to evaluate and historicize the present moment. Such developments often require us to re-evaluate and retheorize media as objects and agents of political change, and CCC welcomes innovative scholarship and commentary in this vein.