Research Themes

Research Themes

Series — International Journal of TV Serial Narratives periodically opens thematic calls designed to address areas of serial culture that remain under-explored in current scholarship. Each Research Theme identifies a field of inquiry that the editors and Advisory Board consider central to understanding how serial narratives are made, circulated, and experienced today. Each call invites contributions from a wide range of disciplines, methods, and national contexts.

The themes reflect the journal’s long-standing view of seriality as more than a textual form. Seriality is also an industrial, technological, and cultural phenomenon, produced within complex systems of firms, platforms, markets, professional practices, and audiences. Through these calls, we aim to extend the study of serial narratives beyond its traditional focus on scripted fiction and Anglo-American cases. We also want to encourage approaches that are still under-represented in the field, including comparative and transnational perspectives, historical research, and data-driven and computational methods.

Current themes

• Serial Industries: Producing, Financing, and Circulating Television Narratives. This call looks at the serial as an industrial object. It covers the economics, production structures, markets, technologies, and policies that shape what gets made, how, and for whom, as well as the ways industrial conditions enable, constrain, or transform creative practice.
• Unscripted Seriality: Industries, Formats, and the Serialisation of Reality. This call examines reality television, factual entertainment, lifestyle programming, true crime, and sports docuseries as both narrative forms and industrial phenomena. It covers format trade and global circulation, as well as platform strategies, production cultures, and the ethics of representing reality.

Each Research Theme has its own call for papers with a detailed rationale, a list of indicative topics, and submission information. Manuscripts are submitted through the journal’s online platform and go through double-blind peer review.

Series is a diamond open-access journal published by the University of Bologna in collaboration with the Universitat Politècnica de València. There are no submission or publication fees.