May 1, 2020

University of Nottingham, UK

Deadline: February 14, 2020

https://digitalcultureconference.wordpress.com/

A one-day conference hosted by the Digital Culture Research Network, and supported by the Midlands4Cities DTP (M4C) Cohort Development Fund

The Digital Culture Research Network is pleased to open the call for papers for our third annual conference: ‘Digital⇌Culture 2020’.

This year’s theme of ‘Boundaries’ encompasses the varied means by which digital technologies challenge, perpetuate or instantiate margins and limits. Despite the potential to transform notions of accessibility, the embodied realities of digital culture are subject to geopolitical, cultural, or ethical limitations. Digital platforms create new avenues for self-representation, and the boundary between our digital selves and our embodied selves ‘IRL’ are becoming increasingly porous (if they were ever really separate at all). The public/private binary is blurred: these identities can be censored by the platform or the state, and have their data privacy violated. In the era of the “long tail,” concepts of cultural fringes or margins are becoming problematized and objects of academic study shun any designation as “high” or “low” culture. The field of digital cultures also presents new challenges to researchers’ ethical boundaries.

Submission

For this one-day conference, we invite researchers from a diverse range of disciplines, particularly those early in their careers, to present theoretical and empirical research related, but not limited, to the following topics:

• Geopolitical contexts of digital technologies
• Methodological and ethical challenges posed by digital culture research
• Data privacy and digital surveillance
• Creative practice and/in digital technologies
• Moderation, censorship and regulation of the Internet
• Identity and its digital mediations
• Embodiment and the Digital
• Digital trash, junk and rubbish
• Changing digital research practice

In order to encourage proposals from doctoral researchers, up to 12 joint-travel/accommodation grants are available to be awarded to successful proposals. Further details below.

Submissions should follow the format below and be submitted to digitalcultureconference@gmail.com by 23:00 GMT on Friday 14th February 2020.

• Paper Title
• Speaker Name
• Speaker Contact Email
• Abstract (up to 250 words outlining the paper's main arguments, methods, and relevance to the conference theme)
• Speaker Biography (up to 100 words)
• Keywords (3 terms relevant to the paper)

Funding

This year, we are pleased to offer the following grant opportunities:

A. 10 grants of one night’s accommodation and £50 towards travel

This grant is open to all doctoral applicants, but at least five of the grants are reserved for non-M4C-funded applicants based at one of the DTP’s eight institutions:

• University of Nottingham
• Nottingham Trent University
• Birmingham City University
• University of Birmingham
• De Montfort University
• University of Leicester
• University of Warwick
• Coventry University

Those currently funded by M4C are not eligible to apply for this grant.

B. 2 grants of one night’s accommodation and £100 towards travel

These two grants are specifically reserved for international researchers in order to facilitate them with the higher cost of coming from abroad to present a paper at the conference.

Both grants will only be offered to doctoral students whose papers have been accepted for the conference.

If you wish to apply for a grant, please complete a Grant Application Form (available at http://bit.ly/digitalculturegrant) and submit it with your abstract. Grants will be awarded on the basis of the conference organising committee’s collective consideration of submitted applications.