Aesthetics and Popular Culture, PJA call

The British Society of Aesthetics’ Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics
http://www.british-aesthetics.org/pja.aspx

The PJA invites contributions from postgraduate students for its Summer/August 2010 issue (vol. 7, no. 2). This will be a special, themed issue of the journal on “Aesthetics and Popular Culture.” Accepted articles will feature alongside an interview with Dr. Aaron Meskin (Leeds) on popular culture, comics and computer games.

Authors are invited to interpret the theme, “Aesthetics and Popular Culture”, broadly. Examples of suitable topics include, but are not limited to:

       Issues in the philosophy of film, television, sport, comics computer games, non-classical genres of music (e.g., rock, hip-hop, electronica), and other popular arts
       The high art/low art distinction
       Mass art
       Aesthetic snobbery
       The ethics of illegally sharing artworks (e.g., music and fiction) via the internet
       The paradox and philosophy of horror
       Digital photography and CGI
       The identity or ontology of adaptations and remakes
       The legitimacy of certain popularist works/genres as artworks
       The ethical value and or harm of certain popularist works/genres (e.g., computer games, hip-hop, horror/‘video-nasties’)

The PJA also welcomes papers that use popularist works/genres as a spring-board from which to explore philosophical concepts, or that discuss how those works/genres themselves might be taken to explore philosophical concepts. Some examples of suitable topics include:

       Memento and the extended mind hypothesis
       The representation of agency and first-person experience in fps computer games
       The ethics of 'on-line' inter-personal interaction in MMORPGs
       The portrayal of tele-transportation in works of science-fiction

Authors who are in doubt as to the suitability of their paper are encouraged to email the PJA editor for advice at:
pgjeditor@british-aesthetics.org.

The PJA welcomes papers from diverse philosophical perspectives (including analytic, continental and historical ones). Submissions should be accessible, concise, and have recognisably philosophical content that is sensitive to the existing literature on the paper's topic. Submissions should be roughly 3,000 words in length, but not longer than 3,500. On issues of formatting (referencing style, etc.) authors should consult the current issue of the journal at:
http://www.british-aesthetics.org/pjacurrent.aspx.

Suitable papers will be reviewed by the journal’s editorial board, comprised of:
Dr. Aaron Meskin (Leeds)
Dr. Alex Neill (Southampton)
Dr. Ben Saunders (Oxford)
Dr. Kathleen Stock (Sussex)

Deadline: 1st August 2010. Papers should be submitted in Rich Text Format (.rtf) via email to pgjeditor@british-aesthetics.org

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About the Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics:

The PJA has a wide readership and has published papers by graduate students from all over the world, including ones from the universities of Manchester, New School, Toronto, Lisbon, Edinburgh, Boston, Oxford, Southampton, Helsinki, St. Andrews, McGill and Cape Town, to name but a few. Recently published papers have tackled a wide range of issues, including: the paradox of fiction, aesthetics of nature, Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, definitions of art, architecture, the ontological status of stories, realism and metaphor, problems of sentimental art, musical experience, gaining knowledge from literature, and photographs as perceptual prostheses.

The PJA also features ‘guest articles’ contributed by professional philosophers. These are original, previously unpublished papers written especially for the journal. Previous authors of such papers include: Peter Goldie, Kathleen Stock, Robert Hopkins, Peter Lamarque, Jerrold Levinson, Jenefer Robinson, Stephen Davies, Gregory Currie, Derek Matravers, Emily Brady, David Davies, Michael Morris and Dawn Phillips.

The PJA is an open-access journal. All content can be viewed freely at:
http://www.british-aesthetics.org/pja.aspx

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Dan Cavedon-Taylor
PhD student in Philosophy
Birkbeck College--University of London
http://dan.cavedon.taylor.googlepages.com

Editor: Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics
http://british-aesthetics.org/pja.aspx