We invite proposals from a range of researchers, makers, designers and producers to publish their research and creative practice, critically and creatively exploring the changing and emerging role of nostalgia as a 21st century phenomenon in/as creative practice.

Permeating within and across contemporary culture, nostalgia is essentially everywhere, playing an ever-pervasive role, one that projects and invents new and idealised images of our past. It continues to permeate everything from Hollywood franchises that seem reliant on cultural nostalgia to capture mass audience attention, to political campaigns that promote a skewed vision of nostalgia to persuade the masses. In this dreamy landscape, questions are evoked about the implications of divorcing individual childhoods, as well as national histories, away from their material realities, and towards a commercial product, or consumable message. More to the point, is the role of nostalgia in today’s culture more amplified than ever before – and if so, what is the relationship between this complex cultural phenomenon and contemporary digital media and creative practices? In other words, how can technology project and invent unique visions of media nostalgia?

This Special Issue of the International Journal of Creative Media Research aims to engage with these questions by exploring the ways in which different disciplines are approaching the question of nostalgia in the digital age, and how 21st century nostalgia is now informing a range of creative practices across film, art, literature, education, music, performance and beyond. Above all else, it aims to characterise ‘digital nostalgia’ as an interdisciplinary phenomenon, one that brings together all of this concept’s past meanings, values and associations across medicine, history and politics with the specific cultural and technological moment of today.

Proposal topics may address, but are not limited to:

Platform-specific research into digital nostalgia (e.g., nostalgia in social media, television, film, video games, music, animation)

Emerging practices of/for nostalgia (e.g. nostalgic marketing and fashion)

New understandings of or approaches to nostalgic culture since Covid-19 (e.g., new forms of negative or positive cultural relationships to the past)

Digital nostalgia and politics (e.g., applications of nostalgic language and imagery in contemporary propaganda and attempts to rewrite histories of oppression)

Digital nostalgia and trauma (e.g., continuing cultural relationships between distortions of the past and traumatic social events)

Creative approaches to expressing meanings of nostalgia in the digital age (e.g., practice-based explorations of theories of nostalgia or fandom practices)

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words (accompanied by a short 100 word biography) to both Bethany Lamont (b.lamont@bathspa.ac.uk) and Beth Wakefield (b.wakefield@bathspa.ac.uk) by no later than July 29, 2022.

The International Journal of Creative Media Research is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed and open access journal devoted to pushing forward the approaches to and possibilities for publishing creative media research. www.creativemediaresearch.org

We will accept work will in one of three submission categories:

‘Single-Piece Explorations’ (i.e. a single video or audio piece accompanied by a 1,500 word research statement)

‘Multi-Piece Portfolios’ (i.e. a number of mixed media artefacts like video, image and audio, accompanied by up to a 1,500 word commentary)

‘Practice Discoveries’ (i.e. a 6,000 word article about an area of creative practice)

Please consult our Author Guidelines page for more information about these submission categories.