The Journal of European Television History and Culture welcomes paper proposals for its third issue dedicated to ‘European TV Memories‘, guest-edited by Jérôme Bourdon (Tel Aviv Univeristy) and Berber Hagedoorn (Utrecht University).

The journal is the first peer-reviewed multi-media e-journal in the field of television studies. Offering an international platform for outstanding academic research on television, the journal has an interdisciplinary profile and acts both as a platform for critical reflection on the cultural, social and political role of television in Europe’s past and present as well as a multi-media platform for the circulation and use of digitized audiovisual material.

The journal’s main aim is to function as a showcase for a creative and innovative use of digitized television material in scholarly work, and to inspire a fruitful discussion between audiovisual heritage institutions (especially television archives) and a broader community of television experts and amateurs. The journal aims at stimulating innovative narrative forms of online storytelling, making use of the digitized audiovisual collections of television archives around Europe.

For the upcoming issue, due for publication in April 2013, the editors welcome two kinds of contributions:

• scholarly articles (historical, sociological or anthropological with a European focus) of 4,000 words
• discoveries: journalistic essays (2,500 words) which include audiovisual sources as a central component and reflect on the practical challenges of doing television research in an archival or academic environment (e.g. case studies, new collections, news from archives, audio/video interviews).

Contributions are invited across disciplines and across different conceptions of memories. Particularly welcome are contributions which study television memories beyond the genres usually emphasized in the study of memory (news and current affairs and historical programmes).

Proposals are invited on (but not limited to) the following suggested topics:

Television as an institution of memory

• the policies of memory in and on television
• event memories: public/private memories of televised media events
• commemorations and anniversaries
• reruns and repetition
• nostalgia programming and TV memorabilia

Preservation and erasure

• the impact and challenges of accessing TV history and memory in the digital age, considering a.o.: online access and storage, copyright issues, open source archiving, digital contextualization, user generated data
• the TV user as archivist
• the future of TV memory

New cultures of remembering and forgetting (via) television

• the impact and challenges of new and digital technologies
• new cultures of viewing and user participation, inside the household (wallpaper memories) and outside
• the gendering of television technologies and experiences
• transnational TV memories

Researching television memories

• the methodological debate: archives, life-stories, political statements

Paper proposals (500 words) are due on September 6th, 2012. Submissions should be sent to the managing editor of the journal, Dr Dana Mustata (journal@euscreen.eu). Articles (2-4,000 words) will be due on December 15th, 2012. Please consult the journal’s Author Guidelines.

For further information or questions about this issue, please contact Jérôme Bourdon (jerombourdon@gmail.com) or Berber Hagedoorn (b.hagedoorn@uu.nl).