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Over the last decade, the spread of digital technologies has profoundlyreshaped intimate lives worldwide, transforming the ways in which peopleare involved in intimate relationships and experience love, sexuality andemotions in everyday lives. Like other places, in the Middle East, millionsuse the internet on a daily basis to access a variety of music and culturalproducts, and to communicate, create and maintain relationships withpartners, family members, friends and lovers, as well as for activism.Indeed, along with providing spaces for different modes of activism andresistance, digital platforms have become critical arenas in which youngpeople negotiate ideas and practices of love, dominant gender roles andreligious and societal values. While some work has begun to criticallyengage with the use of the Internet for activism, very little is known ofthe ways in which digital platforms and different technologies (includingmobile phones) can remold imaginaries and practices of love and friendshipand mediate the ways in which "intimacy" is experienced and lived in theMiddle East.This special issue aims to fill the gap in the scholarship on intimatelives and digital media in Middle East by focusing on the everyday uses ofdigital platforms and addressing their material, gendered and imaginativeimplications for practices. We welcome articles from a wide range ofdisciplines (including and not restricted to anthropology, sociology,internet, cultural and media studies) that draw on empirically-groundedstudies and that raise broader methodological and theoretical reflections.Some of the questions we hope to address are:1.     New imaginaries of love and marriage: how does people's access toonline cultural products (within Islamic and non-Islamic contexts)contribute to remoulding their romantic imaginations, conventionalcourtship practices and intimate desires?2.     Digital media practices: which are the actual media practiceswhereby young people create, maintain, and end intimate relationshipsthrough digital media? How do social media expand inter-personalcommunicative possibilities and wide people's social networks beyondimmediate family and community based networks?3.     Digital media in long distance relationships: how are digital mediaused in long-distances relationships between family members and lovers, innational and transnational contexts?4.     Digital media and social change: how do media practice challenge,reproduce and reinforce dominant social practices and gendered imaginaries?What is the impact of online practices on the way people experienceintimacy in the every-day life?5.     Digital technologies, sex and sexuality: how do people have sexonline? How do they produce and consume pornography?6.     The use of the internet by LGBTQ people: how do they create network,form communities and communicate online?Deadline for submission of abstracts is 30 September 2014.Abstracts should not exceed 500 words and should provide a shortexplanation of your contribution to this special issue, provide a cleardescription of the proposed approach, the theoretical framework andempirical data.Notification of acceptance of abstracts: 15 November 2014Deadline for submission of complete manuscripts: 30 March 2015Articles should be between 6000- 7000 words long and include an abstract of150 words, the author's affiliation and email address and at least fivekeywordsPlease send a paper proposal along with a short bio by 30 September 2014 toElisabetta Costa (University College London) at e.costa@ucl.ac.uk; and toLaura Menin (University of Milano Bicocca) at l.menin@campus.unimib.it.MEJCC is a peer-reviewed journal published by Brill three times a year (http://www.brill.com/middle-east-journal-culture-and-communication