The Disrupted Journal of Media Practice

The Journal of Media Practice (JMP) has, over the years, through its focus on media practice as research, formed an invaluable platform for the communication and circulation of practice-based media-arts research. Through collaborations with its online digital companion, the ScreenWorks platform for peer-reviewed practice research in film and screen media, JMP has been a forerunner in championing and adopting the various multimodal forms practice-based and creative works can take within the context of an academic publication.[1] However, although media practice as a field and community embraces a plurality of media, the materiality of its scholarly forms of production and communication remain predominantly text-based. How then, should a journal of media practice extend from a speculative focus on what media practice as research could be, to an exploration of the alternative forms of communication and circulation it could enable?

This special disrupted issue of the JMP has been conceptualised, edited and performed collectively by Coventry University’s Centre for Disruptive Media (CDM) and the Disruptive Media Learning Lab (DMLL). Disruption, for us, should be seen as an affirmative practice, in the sense that it allows us to experiment with new forms of critique and to rethink and performatively disrupt some of academic publishing’s core foundational concepts and practices, from the single author and the linear argument to the fixed and finalized text-object (for more on this alternative affirmative vision of disruption, see: Broekman et al. 2014; Hall 2016; J. Adema and Hall 2016). As editors, it was important to experiment with how media practice, in rethinking research as practice, could also be involved in disrupting the way we mediate this research through various formal and informal scholarly forms (including the academic journal). As such we put forward a number of provocations with respect to what a ‘journal of media practice’ should or could be, to provide an alternative to the standard single-authored linear 8000-word journal article, that continues to dominate the field, as well as the Journal of Media Practice itself. What would experimental and interventionist forms of mediation and presentation in this respect look like for media practice? And how can JMP stimulate ongoing conversations `around these issues? As such we wanted to explore three central questions in this special issue:



How is media practice disruptive of and re-performing the way we do scholarly communication and education?
How can JMP reconfigure (the politics of) its own practice?
What should a disruptive ‘journal’ of media practice look / sound / feel like?