CfP: Themed Dossier “Urban Deathscapes: Media, Spaces of Death, and the Contemporary City” (Vol. 11, No. 3), edited by Susana Viegas
Every city must negotiate the place of its dead. Cemeteries, crematoria, memorial parks, roadside shrines, temporary memorials, and other deathscapes form an often-overlooked layer of the urban fabric, revealing how societies negotiate memory, ecology, religion, politics, and everyday life. Whether depicting deathscapes as places of dwelling, as in Sérgio Tréfaut’ s “The City of the Dead” (2011), or as destinations of travel, as in Roberto Rossellini’s “Journey to Italy” (1954), media reveal the many ways in which spaces of the dead participate in the social, cultural, and political life of cities. Documentary and fiction films, photography, television, digital media, video games, and social media not only represent urban deathscapes but also influence how they are experienced, imagined, and transformed.
This dossier seeks contributions that examine how media engage with urban deathscapes across historical and contemporary contexts. We welcome contributions from scholars working across film and media studies, urban studies, geography, architecture, anthropology, death studies, environmental humanities, memory studies, and related fields.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Housing, everyday life, and communities in spaces of the dead;
- Tourism, pilgrimage, walking, and travel through urban deathscapes;
- Colonial cemeteries, military cemeteries, contested memorials, and unmarked graves;
- Green burial, biodiversity, and environmental transformations;
- Representations of urban deathscapes in cinema, photography, television, digital media, and video games;
- Heritage, ruins, archaeology, memory, and the coexistence of multiple urban pasts;
Please submit an abstract (maximum 300 words) and a short biography (maximum 100 words) to Susana Viegas (filmdeath@fcsh.unl.pt) by 10 September 2026.
Authors will be notified shortly after the deadline. Full articles (maximum 3,000 words, including references following the Chicago Manual of Style, notes and bibliography system) will be due 1 November 2026 and will undergo anonymous peer review.
Susana Viegas is Assistant Professor at NOVA University Lisbon and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant project “FILM AND DEATH: Film-Philosophy as a Meditation on Death” (2023–2028). Her research focuses on film-philosophy, cinematic temporality, death studies, and environmental approaches to moving images. She is co-editor of “Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image” and has published widely on Gilles Deleuze, film theory, and the philosophy of cinema. Her current work explores the intersections of cinema, death, ecology, and urban space through the concept of the “death-image”. filmdeath.fcsh.unl.pt
2026-27 SCMS Urbanism/Geography/Architecture SIG Graduate Student Writing Award
The Urbanism/Geography/Architecture SIG is seeking submissions for its 5th annual graduate student writing award to honor the most insightful and exciting scholarship coming from our graduate student members. The winning article will be published in Mediapolis, an open access, peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to scholarship exploring the intersections between urban studies/geography/architecture and media studies. The journal, supported by the SIG and SCMS, aims to reach a wide audience within and beyond academia and provides an excellent forum for exploring new ideas and discussions within the field. By selecting this publication venue, the SIG leadership seeks to recognize the value of shorter yet academically rigorous open access formats that have become increasingly crucial to communicate research to a wider audience. In addition to a publication in Mediapolis, the winning author will also be awarded a $200 grant. If you have any questions about this award or its requirements, please contact Noelle Griffis at a.griffis@northeastern.edu.
The award comes with the following requirements:
- The submitter must be a graduate student (someone enrolled in graduate school at some point in 2026). Membership in the Urbanism/Geography/Architecture SIG is encouraged, though not required, upon submission. Winners of the award will be required to join SCMS and the Urbanism/Geography/Architecture SIG.
- The article is to be original, timely media studies scholarship related to at least one of the SIG’s thematic focuses. Articles pending acceptance to other journals or awards, SCMS-affiliated or otherwise, are not eligible. Articles repurposed from graduate courses taken by the student are acceptable. Creative connections to the SIG themes are encouraged. See the link for a full description of the SIG mission.
- The article must be written with a public audience in mind. As such, it must be no more than 3,000 words, not including footnotes, and written in a style accessible to non-academic readers. A list of references should be included with the article. For an example of this style of writing, see the articles here.
- While any major citation format will be accepted upon first submission, the winning article must eventually be formatted by the author to follow the most current edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.
- The article must be submitted to scmsurbanism@gmail.com by 15 December 2026, to be considered for the award. The winner will be announced by the end of January in advance of the 2027 SCMS Conference in Montreal.
CfP: Proposals for themed Dossiers for Mediapolis – A Journal of Cities and Culture
Mediapolis – A Journal of Cities and Culture is an interdisciplinary open access online journal, drawing a connection between culture and the built environment – understood in the broadest sense. We publish research in different forms, from research articles to Q&A interviews and readings list, and across different academic fields, including but not limited to media studies, urban studies, geography, architecture and art history as well as digital humanities.
Mediapolis publishes three issues each year – in April, September and December – featuring a themed dossier edited by a guest editor, as well as contributions edited by the journal’s section editors. For the upcoming issues, we are currently accepting suggestions for themed dossiers: A selection of 6-8 articles (max. 3.000 words each) that are connected through a shared theme. For example, recent dossiers have focused on Projection Activism, Lightscapes/Nightscapes and Playable Cities. We also accept dossiers that emerge out of (small) conferences and symposia. While primarily an academic journal, Mediapolis aims to foster a responsive, robust, and inclusive debate by publishing work that is broadly accessible to a public audience. As a ‘small-gauge’ journal, we are particularly interested in publishing timely contributions that engage with current topics and objects at the intersection of cities and culture, and that feature original thought and work-in-progress rather than reviews of the existing literature. In doing so, Mediapolis aims to counter the often slow and potentially exclusionary nature of traditional publishing models by opening up a space for debate and discussion. All work published in Mediapolis is rigorously edited by the editorial board, and all dossier articles undergo peer review.
If you are interested in editing a themed dossier for an upcoming issue of Mediapolis, please reach out with a theme, brief description and short bio for the guest editor(s) via email to editor@mediapolisjournal.com.