CFP for special issue on Religion and Communication for MEI journal

The journal Mediation and Information (www.mei-info.com) has issued a call for papers for a special issue on religion and communication. They suggest four intersecting lines of research on the field opened up by religion to the sciences of information and communication, which, though it goes back quite a way, has still not been sufficiently investigated:

• the signs and discourse of religious "communication" (speech, rites, rituals, etc.);

• faith, ministry and mission: the actions and communicational rhetoric that come into play (the propagation of faith in time and space, etc.);

• expressions of religion in public and media space (the involvement of religious individuals or institutions in public debate, the press, the cinema, etc.);

• techniques, practices and representations of religious realities in their communicational dimension.

Contributions may concern any religion or religious group, including sects, or any philosophical or spiritual movement that is defined in relation (or in opposition) to religious belief, or assimilated to it, either rightly or wrongly. Whether it be a question of analyses of particular forms of religious communication, or epistemological enquiry, the main focus should be on the communicational dimension (mediation, language, orality, writing, signs, media, system or technique of exchange and transmission), which is the theme of MEI No. 38.

Submission of proposals

• Proposals (500 words maximum, apart from the title and references, in French or English) should be submitted before 30 September 2012.

• A proposal should consist of: a clear (if provisional) title; a presentation of the problematic; a description of the terrain or the corpus; an indication of the disciplinary approach and the theoretical framework; a summary bibliography. The author should situate his proposal within his field of work as a whole.

• Proposals should be sent in two files, in MS Word format or equivalent. One file should contain the author's name, institution, position and contact details, along with the title of the proposal (e.g. "propMEI38_author_keyword_title"). The other should contain the title of the proposal, without any personal details (e.g. "propMEI38_keyword_title"), and the text.

• Proposals should be sent to david.douyere@gmail.com, stephane.dufour@u-bourgogne.fr and odile.riondet@wanadoo.fr, with "MEI No. 38, Religion & communication: proposal" in the subject line.

Schedule

• 30 September 2012: deadline for the reception of proposals.

• 1 November 2012: notification of the selection of proposals, and of editorial guidelines.

• 30 January 2013: deadline for the reception of articles (in French or English) of 4,000 words maximum, including references.

• 20 February 2013: communication of feedback to the authors.

• 20 March 2013: final versions of the articles, after discussions with the authors.

• Second half of 2013: publication of MEI No. 38.

Assessment of texts

MEI's reviewers use a double-blind method: texts submitted to reviewers do not include the names of their authors, and the reviewers maintain anonymity.An international committee makes a selection from among the different proposals, and a second committee carries out an evaluation of the selected articles.

MEI, "Mediation and Information", founded in 1993 by Bernard Darras of Université Paris 1 and Marie Thonon of Université Paris 8, is a peer-reviewed journal of communication. It is thematic, and is published twice-yearly as a reference journal.

More information about the call can be found at: http://www.mei-info.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/CFP_MEI_religion_comm...