We are pleased to announce that our special disrupted issue of the Journal of Media Practice, ‘The disrupted Journal of Media Practice’ has now been officially published.

Conceptualised, edited and performed collectively by Coventry University’s Centre for Disruptive Media (CDM)–which is now the Centre for Postdigital Cultures–and the Disruptive Media Learning Lab (DMLL), this special issue experiments with how media practice, in rethinking research as practice, can also disrupt the way we mediate this research through various formal and informal scholarly forms (including the academic journal).

You can find the full designed postprint version here: https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/publications/the-disrupted-journal-of-media-pratice

And our journal platform with the in-process versions and conversations around them here: http://journal.disruptivemedia.org.uk/

With this hybrid (online and print) open access issue, we want to explore the potential disruptive nature of media practice publishing, as a positive force beyond the safe and pleasant ground of the print-on-paper article. This issue has therefore been structured around a selection of conversations on our custom-designed platform (as well as on participants’ own websites and servers or on external multimedia platforms) which emphasise the evolving and collaborative nature of research. The articles around which these conversations are centred are multimodal, text-based or hybrid; articles, blog posts or podcasts. The conversations openly evolved (from ‘drafts’ to ‘final versions’ and beyond) incorporating peer commentary (via hypothes.is) and (blog) reviews from invited media practitioners and the audience at large.

For the print version of this special issue we have focused on 3 conversations in specific, these are:

• Debating Media Practice Publishing. What could a journal of media practice be in a digital environment? What can we learn from best practices?
• Performative Publishing. How do the media we use perform their content and vice versa? How we can bring together and align more closely the material form of a publication with its content? What is the agency of our media, and how are we entangled with the media we use?
• Practice-Based Methodologies. What methods are most suited to creative practice as research? How can we more closely align practice as research through methodology? How can we explore criticality with or via different media forms?

After the informal and communal feedback and review mechanism that the conversations via the hypothes.is plugin provided to the in-progress content on the platform, we arranged a formal open peer review process for those submissions of which their authors felt they were ready to be published. Submissions that were accepted after this formal open peer review process were included in both the print version and the accompanying online version of JMP available on the Taylor & Francis (T&F) website.

Next to the version of this special issue that is available on the platform, and which includes various submissions, from peer-reviewed to non-peer reviewed, from completed to in-progress and meta-projects, which can all still be updated, changed, extended, enhanced and commented upon, we also led the creative direction for a custom-designed online PDF version available on our website and available in open access, and a fixed version of record, both in print and in a hyperlinked PDF, available on the T&F website. Designed in collaboration with Mark Murphy of Surely Design and our authors, we have attempted to creatively respond to the specific affordances of their projects. In this sense, each contributor was asked to think about how they would like to see their contributions translated in a print environment, whilst at the same time wanting to stretch the specific print practices that we have come to use for an academic journal.

For us this special issue encompasses all these online and offline versions and with this focus on the processual nature of research we wanted to challenge the focus on the publication as a fixed and finalized object and commodity, which, especially in the context of practice-based research, does not necessarily reflect the research process. With this experiment in editing, curating, designing and community-building, we aimed to create an environment which supported and stimulated the various forms in which media practice can be published, whilst developing both the platform, the content and projects, and the various versions of this special issue together in a collaborative and creative environment.