Three-D Issue 27: Amplifying postgraduate and early career voices
Patricia Prieto-Blanco
Networking Knowledge
The first issue of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Journal appeared almost ten years ago. Released as an e-journal in September 2007, Networking Knowledge provides a space for postgraduate and early career researchers to showcase their work. Over the years, this space has nurtured upcoming scholars in the fields of media, communications and cultural studies. The voices of Veronica Barassi, Dario Linares, Ruth San Sabido, Phil Ramsey and many others have populated the electronic pages of Networking Knowledge and thereby contributed to develop a research journal that is both rigorous and free. The visibility of early career media, communications and cultural studies researchers in the UK has greatly benefited from the existence of a stable and dynamic publication: our PGN journal.
From the first editorial team to the current one, all have spoken with one clear voice: academic research needs to be productive, collaborative and open. By setting up Networking Knowledge as an Open Access e-journal in 2007, early career MeCCSA scholars obtained the opportunity to take ownership of their own publishing and distribution process. As a new editor, it is my aim to amplify the resonance of the voices showcased in Networking Knowledge. In order to accomplish this task, I will build onto the achievements of previous editors and focus on implementing small but fundamental improvements in the workflow. I expect the publishing process to grow robuster and the dissemination of contributions to become more diverse in terms of indexing, impact and geography.
Networking Knowledge is part of a network of over 10.000 journals using Open Journal System as their publishing platform. For the past fiftteen years, OJS has been fundamental in the development of open access, innovative and peer-reviewed scholarly publications. Networking Knowledge has been recently updated to OJS 3, which will help to streamline both the editorial workflow as well as the presentation of journal articles and other contributions.
In times of predatory publishers, it is paramount that honest and critical publications continue to open their pages and customary working protocols to newcomers. When I talk about newcomers, I refer to both emerging scholarly voices as well as to novel and compelling ways of distributing and producing academic research. Networking Knowledge pioneered the video abstract two years ago as an innovative and engaging way of disseminating journal articles. As practice-based research continues to grow not only in the UK but also in continental Europe, traditional academic outputs, such as the customary journal article, are evaluated, modified, expanded, remixed. One of the most exciting challenges that practice-based researchers experience is the “translation” of their work to traditional academic outputs. I would like Networking Knowledge to become a place of critical and reflective experimentation on the dissemination of academic research, practice-based or otherwise. As a matter of fact, the first issue of Networking Knowledge published under my editorial mandate contains the journal’s first visual essay.
Co-edited with Maria Schreiber, the special issue Together While Apart? Mediating Relationships and Intimacy, seeks to explore how interpersonal relationships are mediated in contemporary contexts by highlighting emotive dimensions of mediated communication. By featuring theoretical propositions alongside empirical studies on mediations of everyday life, Together while Apart? highlights how mediated interactions are nowadays entangled with emotional processes of socialization and practices of connectivity, which take place within technical infrastructures that might afford or constrain certain practices.
Published just on time to be added to your Christmas/Winter break reading list, the sixth and last issue of Networking Knowledge in 2016, presents research from a broad variety of cultural contexts, dealing with a range of different relationship practices: parenting in Britain, backpacking Westerners in South-East-Asia, young coupling in Singapore, Trans-experience in the US, performing para-social intimacy through Vine, and, not to be missed: the globally known <3, which French people apparently dislike. It is my pleasure to invite you to immerse yourself in the Journal’s pages, to listen to cutting edge scholarly voices and to feedback your criticism and suggestions to both the contributors and the editorial team.