Every day thousands of people leave their home, fleeing the terror of war, extremism, and poverty, searching for a new place to live, a roof above their heads. The official institutions of the European Union are cracking under the public reactions to the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, while many of the populations of the constituent nations appear divided between a pragmatic will to help and xenophobic defense reflexes. As border controls within Europe are being reinstated as emergency measures, people seem to be divided by the questions and problems raised for national security, identity, and feeling ‘at home’. This current wave of migration from war zones in the Middle East and Africa makes the question of ‘home’ an urgent problem that we want to address in the Autumn 2016 special section of NECSUS.

We would like to investigate the relation between the question of home and the media, both in light of the migration crisis and in a more broad historical and theoretical perspective. Home is a concept that has been crucial in many fields of inquiry such as investigations of transnational media practices, considerations of diaspora and homeland, and particular generic and formal configurations (the German Heimat-film, the melodrama and its focus on the domestic sphere), as examples. The media has also played a crucial role in the construction of belonging and identity, both for the individual and for larger groups such as families, diasporic communities, and nations. The home has also been a place of shifting patterns of media consumption, from radio and television as technologies centered on domestic environments to upgrades in home entertainment systems as crucial markers of the reconfigurations of cinema in the age of digital networks. In this sense, the home as constructed and questioned through images, texts, and sounds is a central topic of audiovisual media. In the metaphor of the homepage, the Internet has also appropriated this sense of origin and affiliation for its own purposes. The home delivery of content through online channels is perhaps the key issue for media conglomerates worldwide.

We invite contributions for the Autumn 2016 special section of NECSUS on (but not limited to) the following topics:

# social media and migration (Facebook and other online ‘home communities’)

# accented cinema

# video letters and the epistolary genre in visual art

# home movies and videos

# music videos and songs of the homeland

# melodrama’s mise-en-scene of the home and the Heimat-film

# political documentaries about migration

# films and television series that question (or reaffirm) the ‘homeland’

# meta-reflections on the role of media in relation to the nation-state, imaginary communities, and historical movements of migration

# media that reinforce the home(land) as being under constant stress and pressure

# home and the global city in film, television, and installation art

# the homepage and home entertainment systems

We look forward to receiving abstracts of 300 words, 3-5 bibliographic references, and a short biography of 100 words by 29 February 2016 at the following address: g.decuir@aup.nl. On the basis of selected abstracts writers will be invited to submit full manuscripts (5,000-7,000 words, revised abstract, 4-5 keywords) in July, which will subsequently go through a double-blind peer review process.

NECSUS also accepts abstract submissions on a rolling basis throughout the year for a wide variety of articles on a number of themes related to media studies, in addition to proposals for festival, exhibition, and book reviews, as well as audiovisual essays. Please note that we do not accept full manuscripts for consideration without an invitation. Access our submission guidelines at http://www.necsus-ejms.org/guidelines-for-submission/.