Call for Projects /// CRITICALPRODUCTIVE JOURNAL NO.05 – MEDIASCAPES + URBAN IDENTITY

CriticalProductive Journal is a double-blind peer-reviewed magazine/journal located at the critical confluence of culture, arts, architecture, and urbanism. CriticalProductive Journal is dedicated to interrogating the ways in which politics is entangled with spatial and aesthetic production.

CriticalProductive’s mission is to mobilize the consciousness and potential of unfinished social movements through the publication of peer-reviewed creative work and scholarship. We publish innovative research, scholarship, and creative work that is at the forefront of architecture, urbanism, and cultural theory. We welcome essays, creative design work, and visual art. CriticalProductive Journal is published three times per year by Critical Productive, Inc. and is distributed by the MIT Press.

RITICALPRODUCTIVE JOURNAL NO.05

CALL FOR PROJECTS, OPEN FEBRUARY 16–JUNE 10, 2026

THEME: MEDIASCAPES + URBAN IDENTITY

Milton S. F. Curry, Editor

Elena Bellaart, Editorial Coordinator

Nahum Dimitri Chandler, Associate Issue Editor

“The urban” has taken many forms in the history of film, video and moving image works—with both documentary depictions and speculative representations of poverty, marginal life and geographies, displacement and gentrification, social alienation, racial and ethnic identities, gender and sexual identities, politics and social activism. As both a trope and a subject, the urban—a conceptualization of lifeways existing within the construct of “the city” that are beyond economic capture—has emerged as a distinguishing conceptual frame for understanding the ways that cities have succumbed to their own commoditization and commercialization. By abstracting moving images of the city from its physical and corporeal reality, film, video and moving image media provide unique experiential power to forces of activism and critique that are difficult to sustain when applied to the literal geography of the city as a technocratic, political construct.

CriticalProductive Journal Issue 05 will explore speculative film, video and moving image media that represents aspects of the urban and the city. Mediascapes + Urban Identity conjoins notions of imaginary landscapes and mediascapes as a phenomena catalyzed by the explosion of digital tools of production and dissemination (ubiquity of phone cameras, social media channels, streaming services, etc.). We invite the submission of creative and critical works asserting a variety of readings of the city and the urban, and from any genre; we are particularly interested in non-didactic works that are innovative within and beyond their respective mediums, exploring questions like: How does the construct of the city that exists in film differ from the corporeal reality of urban life? What visual techniques are particularly generative for producing representations of urban identity, and what political or critical opportunities does speculative film open up for understanding the city as such?

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES; DEADLINE JUNE 10, 2026

We invite the submission of works, analyses, and critiques—rigorous, culturally-informed, and exploratory intellectual offerings from writers, scholars, artists, photographers, and designers. We consider work from interdisciplinary perspectives—including disciplines such as media studies, film studies, performance studies, architecture history and theory, urban sociology, art history, and anthropology. To accompany the Journal’s print work, CriticalProductive is also pleased to invite the submission of short films and videos about urban identity and the city to be featured on our website. Videos should be 3–10 minutes in length and submitted as mp4 files, accompanied by textual framing of 700–1,000 words and selected stills.

Works may be submitted as texts (2,000–6,000-word essays with visual accompaniments) or as visual submissions (art, design, architecture and urban design, urbanism and landscape architecture) accompanied by text (1,000–6,000 words). To submit text and visual folios, contributors should: review the full, detailed Submission Guidelines on CriticalProductive’s MIT Press page (https://direct.mit.edu/cpro; https://direct.mit.edu/cpro/pages/submission-guidelines) and register as an Author and upload materials in the Journal’s online submission system: (https://www.editorialmanager.com/cpjournal/default2.aspx).

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