Down to The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television

Down to The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television

Edited by Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall
(University of British Columbia)

Proposals are invited for an edited collection of original essays that examine “The Wire,” HBO’s award-winning television series, which has just concluded its fifth and final season.

 

The volume will be published by Continuum <http://www.continuumbooks.com>, which also published “Cylons in America” (ed. Potter and Marshall), winner of the 2008 Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association award for Best Edited Collection.
The editors seek contributors who will examine “The Wire” from a variety of critical, theoretical, and cultural perspectives. This collection will be aimed at both academic readers and an educated general audience. We seek essays that are both scholarly and engaging.

The complexity of “The Wire” as unforgiving political and social commentary demands academic investigation. Because the show addresses so many different social contexts, it is expected that this volume will include chapters from several disciplines and methodologies, including literary and cultural studies, political science, sociology, film and media studies, law, psychology, criminology, and philosophy.

In addition to what we expect might include season-based examinations of drug crime, blue-collar crime, social policy and practice, education, and the media, as well as discussions of the nature of fictional representations of aspects of American life, the following is a list of topics that contributors might explore, though we invite proposals from any disciplinary perspective on any aspect of the series and its reception. 

-philosophical implications and frameworks for “The Wire” -intersections between representations of race, economy, and criminality
- issues of masculinity
- gender and sexuality in police and criminal cultures
- the family, childhood, parenting, and criminality
- re-imagining of the heroic beyond traditional narratives of America
- roles for women in urban America
- the technology of crime
- street speech and class-based communication
- cultures of addiction and treatment 
- constructions of violence
- stress and trauma narratives
- education and class
- interest groups and issues of governance
- cable television and representing America
- issues of genre and narrative
- The Wire as television: direction, cinematography, music, casting, etc.
- The Wire, The Corner, and Homicide: Life on the Street  
- representations of Baltimore

Please send a 500-word abstract or completed essay (4,000-6,000 words), plus a brief biographical statement (or c.v.), as e-mail attachments (in Word or as a Rich Text File) to both of the editors:

Tiffany Potter (tpotter@interchange.ubc.ca)
C.W. Marshall (toph@interchange.ubc.ca)

Deadline for abstract submission: 9 June 2008.

If your proposal is chosen for inclusion, you will have until October 2008 for final submission of your chapter.
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_______________________
Dr. Tiffany Potter
Department of English
University of British Columbia