"Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture" is an interdisciplinary journal produced out of RMIT University in Australia. Staff in the Communications & Writing program at Monash University's Gippsland campus produce one special issue each year. This year we invite you to address the broad topic of the politics of consent, along the following lines:

"Manufacturing Consent?"
How can consent be theorised today? What, for instance, are the contemporary means or conditions for manufacturing consent? What is the role of media rhetoric and practice in the formation of consent? What is the place of consent in advanced liberal democracies, or in other non-liberal geo-political contexts? What are the relations between consent and consensus in political or governmental processes? How essential is consent or consensus to the operations of contemporary politics and of global politics in particular? Can consent be gained on a supra-national level? Or must it be conceived, at every level, as unstable and ineffective, as no longer relevant to the study of democracy in its many forms?And what of past theories of consent and consensus, such as the one bound to a notion of “hegemony”? In what ways do contemporary events — “September 11”, “Iraq”, “Tampa”, “Madrid” — invite us to return to and to reconsider such theories and their place (or otherwise) within communication studies, as part (or not) of the history of the discipline?Southern Review invites theoretically informed discussions (4000-6000 words) of the contemporary forms, places, functions and possibilities of consent for the 2004 special issue, “Manufacturing Consent?”. Papers may be submitted as attachments to an email, and should be double-spaced in A4 format and accompanied by an abstract (maximum 100 words). Referencing is author-date (notes for contributors and full details of house style are available on request).

The general aim of Southern Review, an interdisciplinary journal, is to focus on the connections between communication and politics. Southern Review is interested in communication and cultural technologies, their histories, producers and audiences, policies and texts. Articles are welcomed which connect these either to arenas of legislative or parliamentary politics, or to broader negotiations of power.

Full articles to robert.briggs@arts.monash.edu.au and/or philip.dearman@arts.monash.edu.au by July 30, 2004.

Philip Dearman

Lecturer, Communications & Writing

Monash University, Gippsland

Northways Road, Churchill, 3842

AUSTRALIA

ph +613 9902 6322

fax +613 9902 6359