for Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media (Issue 8, Dec. 2024)

Special Issue Guest Editors (Part I):

Dr. Manuel Portela, University of Coimbra, Portugal, mportela@fl.uc.pt

Dr. Vasileios N. Delioglanis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, deliogla@enl.auth.gr

Referring to location-aware and mobile technologies, locative media is a new field that has emerged from the recent conversation between developing disciplines in the area of urban studies, digital literary studies, and cultural studies. While the term “locative media” was coined in 2003 by the new media artist Karlis Kalnins, the emergence of smartphone technologies and especially the integration of GPS technology in mobile devices in the late 2000s led to the commercialization and popularization of locative media projects in the 2010s. Mobile and locative media technologies, which have constituted a significant part of our technological reality in the last two decades, have signalled a major shift in the ways we perceive and experience physical, digital, narrative, and game spaces. The special volume of Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Literature, Culture and Media will attempt to capture new trends, experiments, and transitions in mobile and locative media practice that have shaped and are currently shaping Anglophone literary and cultural production. Interestingly, Rowan Wilken et al. propose that locative media should be viewed from a broad perspective, while also stressing the need to “‘internationaliz[e]’ the study of location technologies” (5). In line with this, the present edition aims to explore the evolution and function of the constantly expansive terrain of locative media: the volume intends to bring to the fore the most characteristic manifestations of mobile and locative media practice that have shaped socio-cultural tendencies and consciousness on a global level.

This volume approaches locative and mobile technologies from a multidisciplinary perspective, by calling attention to the convergence of new media studies, (digital) narrative studies, urban studies, game studies, and cultural studies, explored through the lens of mobile locative media. What are the novel spatial, narrative, and game forms that emerged in the 2010s and early 2020s as a result of the aforementioned convergence? What is the role and contribution of mobile (locative) media in the current literary and cultural production and scholarship?

The editors of this volume invite essay submissions that address (but are not limited to) the following themes:

• Mobile/locative media and hybrid space(s)
• Mobile/locative media spaces in the covid-19 era
• (Representations of) surveillance space(s)
• (Representations of) mobile/locative media in fictional narratives
• Mobile/locative media and multimodality
• Mobile/locative media across print/digital narratives
• Locative transmedia storytelling
• Narrative experimentations with mobile/locative media
• (Locative) social media
• Audio walks and museum narratives/apps
• Augmented reality narratives and games
• Urban space(s) and the Internet of Things
• Mobile/locative media and narrative genres: poetry, fiction, drama
• Mobile/locative media and popular culture
• Ambient literature
• Mobile/locative media and fantasy/science fiction narratives
• Mobile/locative media, hypertext, and multimedia fiction(s)
• Locative media authoring tools
• Ubiquitous Computing
• Beyond gaming: Computer games, mobile/locative games and game-story hybrids.

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is November 15, 2023.

Length of abstract: 150-180 words.

Your abstract submission should include:

• title
• author(s)
• author contact information
• affiliated institution
• brief bio
• 4-5 keywords

Please send your emails to:

Dr. Manuel Portela (mportela@fl.uc.pt)

Dr. Vasileios N. Delioglanis (deliogla@enl.auth.gr)