Special Features on Flow Needs You!

by: Jean Lauer and Special Features Editors

One of Flow’s primary goals is to promote interactive and ongoing discussions on contemporary and historically relevant media issues. As readers have come to expect, the core of the publication consists of our regular columnists, as well as our invited guest columnists, whose insightful work has certainly generated substantial interest and comments on the website.

In addition to our regular and guest columns, we also reserve space in each issue for a Special Features column — a vital segment of our publication. As Flow enters into its 5th volume, we wish to foreground our commitment to publishing engaging topics of interest from as many areas of media scholarship as possible, not just from our invited columnists but also from other interested authors.

If you have yet to discover Special Features, we invite you to do so. In the last volume, we had articles submitted and published on a wide variety of topics, including Postfeminism and the New Single Man (in 4.3), the CSI Effect (in 4.5), Normative Family and Will and Grace (in 4.8), and Isreali Idol and Globalization (in 4.10), just to name a few. As might be evident from these topics, we seek Special Features articles as compliments to the inquiries raised by other columnists, with the aim of expanding the range of discussions open at any given time on Flow.

We remain committed to publishing topical one-time columns in Flow Volume 5. We especially encourage graduate students, recent grads embarking on their professional careers, and independent scholars to submit work in early stages of development, in order to receive some feedback on their work in our forum.

If you are interested in submitting a column for review, please read through our latest suggested calls. Even if your work does not match the specific calls, we invite short, focused pieces of 800-1000 words for review. As with regular columns, Special Features are expected to fall somewhere in between academic and journalistic discourses with the aim of spurring discussion on message boards. For submissions or questions, please contact Jean Lauer at jalauer@mail.utexas.edu.