2025 War & Media Studies Grad Student Writing Award
The War and Media Studies SIG is holding its annual graduate student writing award competition to showcase innovative work in the field by our graduate student members. We will again be partnering with the Sage journal Media, War & Conflict and the winning author will have the opportunity to be published in the journal in addition to receiving a $100 cash prize.
Media, War & Conflict is an international, peer-reviewed, inter- and multi-disciplinary journal that maps the shifting arena of war and conflict in media environments and ecologies. It explores cultural, political, social and technological transformations in the conduct, outcome and consequences of intensively mediated war. Topic coverage includes how media, war and conflict converge in subjects such as:
- Journalism and witnessing
- Security, politics and militaries
- Art, aesthetics, photography, film and popular culture
- Technologies, spatialities and architectures
- Aftermath, reconciliation, peace processes
- Memory, commemoration and archives
- Identity and embodiment
- Practices, cultures and ethics
- Audiences and engagement
- Narratives, legitimation of war and peace
For more about the journal and its focus, see https://journals.sagepub.com/home/mwc.
Eligibility and Guidelines for Submission
- Entrants must be members of SCMS and the War and Media Studies SIG for the year in which they are submitting.
- Entrants must be enrolled in a recognized program of graduate study at the time of submission.
- Essays should be between 7,000 and 8,000 words(including references) and be formatted as PDFs.
- Essays should include a 100-150 word abstract and 4-6 keywords.
- While any major citation format will be accepted upon first submission, the winning article must eventually be formatted according to the journal’s Sage Harvard style.
- Submissions may have been prepared as graduate coursework or for part of dissertation or thesis work.
- Essays must not have been published or accepted for publication at the time of submission.
- Applicants may only submit one essay in any given year.
- Co-authored works will share the first-place $100 cash prize between authors.
- Previous winners may not submit in the year immediately following their award.
To Apply
Submit essays to Nathan Blake (n.blake@northeastern.edu). The essays will be evaluated in terms of their compatibility with the aims and scope of the journal, originality, rigor of research, theoretical and analytical clarity, relevance, and writing style.
The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2024.
If you have any questions about this award or its requirements, please contact the SIG Co-Chairs, Cortland Rankin (rankicw@bgsu.edu) and/or Nathan Blake (n.blake@northeastern.edu).
Past Winners
2023-2024: Max Berwald, “The Depoliticization of Martyrdom in Chinese Cinema of the Korean War: From Heroic Sons and Daughters (1964) to The Battle at Lake Changjin (2021)”
2022-2023: Hugo Ljungbäck, “Vertical Interference: Video, Drone Witnessing, and the Myth of Precision Targeting”
2021-2022: Cancelled due to COVID-related shortage of funds
2020-2021: Cancelled due to COVID-related shortage of funds
2019-2020: Kate Kennelly, “Remembering Women’s Role in the Algerian War of Independence: Assia Djebar’s The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua (1978)”
2018-2019: Jaka Lombar, “Between Trauma and Representation: Film Texture as a Surface of Possibility in Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust”
2017-2018: Sasha Crawford-Holland, “Regarding the Pornography of Violence: Visual Erotics after 9/11”
2016-2017: Daniel Grinberg, “Re-viewing Histories: Seeing Documentary Production and Surveillance Through the Freedom of Information Act”