Dr. Payal Arora has been appointed as the new Section Editor for a new University of California Press Journal called Global Perspectives. Global Perspectives (GP) is an online-only, peer-reviewed, trans-disciplinary journal seeking to advance social science research and debates in a globalizing world, specifically in terms of concepts, theories, methodologies, and evidence bases.
Global Perspectives
oGP is devoted to the study of global patterns and developments across a wide range of topics and fields, among them trade and markets, security and sustainability, communication and media, justice and law, governance and regulation, culture and value systems, identities, environmental interfaces, technology-society interfaces, shifting geographies and migration.
GP sets out to help overcome national and disciplinary fragmentation and isolation. GP starts from the premise that the world that gave rise to the social sciences in their present form is no more. The national and disciplinary approaches that developed over the last century are increasingly insufficient to capture the complexities of the global realities of a world that has changed significantly in a relatively short period of time. New concepts, approaches and forms of academic discourse may be called for. GP has been organized by subject sections carrying equal weight, which are informed by major conceptual or empirical issues or grounded in traditional disciplines, while always inviting significant interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches.
Dr. Arora will lead the Communication and Media section with Helmut K. Anheier from the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, Germany serving as the Editor-in-Chief. She has organized a board of global and renowned scholars to aid in this endeavor. The members are as follows:
- Lina Dencik, Cardiff University, UK
- Terry Flew, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
- Mark Graham, University of Oxford, UK
- Min Jiang, UNC Charlotte, USA
- Koen Leurs, Utrecht University, Netherlands
- Cornelius Puschmann, Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research, Germany
- Nimmi Rangaswamy, IIIT Hyderabad, India
- Anita Say Chan, University of Illinois, USA
- Fabro Steibel, Institute for Technology and Society, Brazil
- Wendy Willems, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
- Guobin Yang, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Framing of the Communcation and Media section
Arora has framed the theoretical launching points for this section as follows: "The ‘global turn’ in media and communication demands new ways of conceptualizing relations and boundaries between the local, the national and the transnational. In recent years, ubiquitous computing, mobile technologies and social media have amplified the urgency to unpack the globalizing of media platforms, communication patterns and processes as well as their underlying politics and policies."
"While the media continues to be implicated in the “disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics” as Arjun Appadurai astutely observed a quarter century ago, their digital cultures have created new opportunities and discontinuities at a global scale that require a prolonged and thoughtful investigation."