Mission Statement

The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies is the peer-reviewed, scholarly publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). The journal was renamed (from Cinema Journal) in October 2018.

JCMS’s basic mission is to foster engaged debate and rigorous thinking among humanities scholars of film, television, digital media, and other audiovisual technologies. We are committed to the aesthetic, political, and cultural interpretation of these media and their production, circulation, and reception.

To that end, JCMS is dedicated to intellectual diversity of all kinds. We publish critical inquiry into the global, national, and local circulation of a wide variety of media. We seek to promote a range of approaches to film and media studies and attendant fields, including (but not limited to) digital media, sound studies, visual culture, video game studies, fan studies, and avant-garde and experimental film and media practices. We do not adhere to any methodological approach to media studies, nor do we focus on particular emphases in the field. The journal is open to all areas of humanities-oriented scholarship in media studies, including digital humanities.

JCMS comprises a constellation of forums for scholarship. In addition to 8,000- to 10,000-word research articles, the journal’s quarterly issues include an “In Focus” dossier examining a topic of timely concern to SCMS members and book reviews of recently published texts in the field. JCMS also publishes the quarterly, open-access, online features Archival News, Professional Notes, Spotlight, JCMS Teaching Dossier (in partnership with TeachingMedia.org), and “In Focus” Theme Weeks (in partnership with In Media Res). Moving towards a digital-forward life, JCMS also releases Fifth Issue, an open-access, online-only issue each year, featuring rigorously peer-reviewed, feature-length articles. It also enjoys an ongoing relationship with [in]Transition, the first peer-reviewed academic journal of videographic film and moving image studies.

Complete issues with full-text articles (from 1999 to present) are also available to read online at Project Muse.

JCMS Publishing Initiative & Facilitated Peer Review

To help directly address concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion in JCMS, the Associate Editors of Outreach and Equity now coordinate the JCMS Publishing Initiative. The Initiative includes direct solicitation to and recruitment of minority authors and/or scholars working in areas that have been underrepresented in the journal’s history, as demonstrated by the "Looking Back, Thinking Forward" digital humanities assessment.

As a part of this developmental process, Initiative authors are matched with SCMS members who have expertise in their areas of study. These mentors provide feedback on unpublished work that has already been fully drafted but has not yet been submitted to the journal for peer review.

The Initiative also includes a Facilitated Peer Review process. When authors submit an article for peer review, they will check a box at the first step of submission to indicate that they have participated in the Initiative with the Co-Associate Editors. This will impact the review process in two ways:

First, in consultation with the JCMS Editors, the Co-Associate Editors will suggest qualified peer reviewers for all articles that have been developed through the Initiative. After appropriate peer reviewers have been secured, Initiative articles will proceed through JCMS’s standard double-blind peer review process.

Second, in the instances when an article receives a double rejection by peer reviewers, the Co-Editors will coordinate with the author and their mentor to revise and resubmit the article. The Initiative author thus earns a chance to start the peer review process anew. If the article receives substandard or inadequate reviews a second time, the submission will be rejected and the Co-Associate Editors will recommend other venues for the work.

While the Facilitated Peer Review in no way guarantees that Initiative authors will be published in JCMS, it has been designed to better support underrepresented scholars throughout the often-long process of developing compelling and rigorous scholarship.

Authors interested in the Publishing Initiative should contact the Co-Associate Editors by emailing oe_editors@jcmsjournal.org with a short introduction of their work and an academic biography.