Media border phenomena – crossing and falling below borders, drawing and shifting borders – are fundamental elements of communicative practice. Investigating them allows us to explore both the limiting characteristics of specific (individual) media and media constellations and the nature of the borders themselves. The heterogeneity of the subject area – which is located in artistic as well as everyday, historical as well as contemporary forms of communication – causes the interest and participation of a wide range of disciplines in its research.
At the latest since the emergence of the so-called "new media" and the urgent questions associated with them, as well as the increased attention to the complexity of communicative actions, a rapidly growing and differentiated research field has emerged in the past decades. The approaches and concepts developed to understand the complex, media-related structures of relations can hardly be overlooked and have led to a multitude of outstanding research projects and a plurality of technical terms. However, as interdisciplinary the objects, as individual the approaches and affiliations of the researchers may be, the discourse unfortunately lacks this characteristic to a large extent. One reason for this lies in the lack of comprehensibility of some of them as a result of terminological and methodological weaknesses in the research field.
This is where this anthology would like to start and take a first step towards an urgently needed, genuine interdisciplinary discourse. The aim is explicitly not to standardize the discourse, but rather to re-focus the currently extremely differentiated theoretical approaches and studies, some of which have become incomprehensible to one another. A strict focus is to be placed on the disciplinary diversity of the contributions. In preparation for a more intensive discussion and stimulation of discourse, the aim is to compile an overall glossary which can provide a first insight into the similarities and differences of different research approaches, some of which may be surprising, and which should make it easier for the readers of the volume to compare and link the contributions.
The structure of the volume is divided into two parts:
In the first part of the volume, theoretical and methodological positions are presented, which are intended to illuminate as diverse and broad a spectrum as possible: from literary-scientific approaches to intermediality, through media-linguistic multimodal analysis procedures, architectural-theoretical positions on multimedia, to approaches from theatre and art studies, and many others.
In the second part, the potential of the questions will be demonstrated on the basis of concrete case studies from various disciplines, subject areas and epochs. For the categorization, the respective focused media constellation or relation will be used, i.e. whether it is a matter of at least two media that are present in different temporal and/or spatial situations or whether it is a media constellation in which several media are present in a common spatio-temporal situation and are in a mutual relationship to each other.
Short abstracts (approx. 300 words) for theoretically oriented articles (1st part) or concrete case studies (2nd part) should be submitted together with a short CV (incl. research focus and disciplinary orientation) by 31 January 2021 by email to nora.benterbusch@uni-saarland.de. Please make sure that your abstracts on concrete case studies also clearly show the underlying methodological and theoretical background.
The final articles should be submitted until 31 October 2021 and have a length of between 40,000 and 60,000 characters (including spaces). Articles can be submitted in German or English.