ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

The Media Fields Research Collective at UC Santa Barbara is excited to announce its call for papers for /Media Fields Journal/ Issue 15: Media Cultures of the (Inter/Anti)Imperial Pacific

Submission Deadline: April 1, 2019

Recent controversies—from protracted battles over international tariff structures to renewed nuclear sabre rattling between the United States and North Korea, and from the brutalities of offshore migrant detention in places like Nauru to the construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea—have thrust the Pacific theater to the forefront of global geopolitical attention. But while these disputes often appear in the guise of crisis, as urgent, largely unanticipated outbreaks of acrimony, they are in many ways historically implicated. As Kornel Chang writes, the Pacific has long been a deeply vexed geopolitical and cultural domain, a vast theater of “interimperial” encounter striated by the violences of colonial settlement, neocolonial retrenchment, capitalist exploitation, racial domination, and military conquest. But if these are political and cultural histories, they are at the same time media histories. Indeed, since at least the mid-19th century, media and communication technologies have played a central role both in the consolidation of imperial ambitions across the Pacific, as well as in the manifold ways these ambitions have been sabotaged, undermined, and refused. Seeking to thematize these complex and ongoing histories, issue 15 of /Media Fields Journal/ will explore the media cultures of the (inter/anti) imperial Pacific.

In recent years, scholars of media and technology have turned often toward the Pacific, showing how the region’s overlapping histories of colonization and imperial expansion have fundamentally shaped global communication infrastructures, and vice versa. Nicole Starosielski, for instance, has shown the remarkable degree to which contemporary undersea cable networks, particularly those that connect the west coast of North America with the Asia Pacific, retrace nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial trading routes, transposing the lineaments of territorial empire into a fiber optic register. Ruth Oldenziel, similarly, has read the Pacific as a techno-imperial palimpsest, uncovering the surprising geographic and logistical continuities between colonial coaling stations, early electric telegraph networks, and the shortwave communications infrastructures that proliferated across the Pacific in the Cold War years. Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike, finally, have reconstructed in painstaking detail the emergence of coherent communications markets in and around the Asia Pacific after about 1860—a project that played out through a baffling choreography of interimperial negotiation and corporate shell gaming.

In the hopes of extending these important contributions in new directions, we seek original scholarship that explores how media have functioned as tools of imperial governance in the Pacific since the 19th Century, as well as their involvement in struggles for otherwise Pacific worlds and decolonial futures. To this end, we invite contributions that bring media history, theory and analysis into sustained conversation with such fields as Native American and Indigenous studies, postcolonial theory, critical race and ethnic studies, island and ocean studies, and archipelagic American studies (see Roberts & Stephens, 2017). However, we encourage submissions from all those whose work explores the richness and vitality of Pacific media cultures—whether historical, contemporary, or emergent—through the lenses of imperiality, coloniality, and/or decolonization. Moreover, even as we acknowledge the abiding hegemony of the United States across much of the Pacific theater, we strongly encourage submissions that provincialize US- and Anglo-centric perspectives, and approach the question of Pacific imperiality from alternative national and/or geopolitical contexts.

Potential topics for papers include but are not limited to:

• Indigenous media theory, history, and critique
  
• Comparative and differential Indigeneities
  
• The technopolitics of imperial administration
  
• Activist media: anti-imperialism, decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty
  
• The aesthetic and representational politics of (de)colonization
  
• Piracy, hacking, and sabotage
  
• Trauma, memory, and the archive
  
• Oceanic media infrastructures
  
• Colonial and imperial nostalgia
  
• South-South/East-East solidarities
  
• Critical political economy: tariffs, trade, intellectual property, informality
  
• Gender, sexuality, and desire
  
• Past futures: Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement, Nuclear Non-Proliferation
  
• Environmental disruption and resource extraction (seafloor dredging, artificial island construction, mining, dumping, pollution, sea level rise)
  
• Media policy and regulation in/of colonial states
  
• Media, technology, and discourses of development
  
• (Mili)tourism
  
• Techno-orientalism
  
• (Revisiting) the cultural imperialism thesis
  
• Analytics of migration and settlement: the settler, the ‘coolie,’ the arrivant, the ‘free laborer,’ the indentured, etc.
  
• Asian settler colonialism (see Okamura & Fujikane, 2008; Saranillio, 2013)
  
• Empire and/as media distribution
  
• Media and scalarity: locality, regionality, nationality, globality, and the hemispheric
  

For any inquiries, please contact issue co-editors Tyler Morgenstern (tylermorgenstern@ucsb.edu) and Xiuhe Zhang (xiuhezhang@ucsb.edu).

Submissions should be approximately *1500–2500 words*, and should include at least one image or audio or video clip related to the essay topic. Email submissions to submissions@mediafieldsjournal.org.

For more information and complete submission guidelines, please visit http://www.mediafieldsjournal.org

References:

Kornel Chang, /Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands /(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

Jonathan Y. Okamura and Candace Fujikane (editors), /Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai/ (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008).

Ruth Oldenziel, “Islands: The United States as a Networked Empire,” in /Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War/, edited by Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 13-41.

Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens (editors), /Archipelagic American Studies /(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017).

Dean Itsuji Saranillio, "Why Asian settler colonialism matters: a thought piece on critiques, debates, and Indigenous difference,"/Settler Colonial Studies 3/, 4 (2013), 280-294.

Nicole Starosielski, /The Undersea Network /(Durham and London: Duke University Press,2015).

Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike, /Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930/ (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007).

Tallinn University invites applications for the position of "Professor of Cultural Data Analytics" to commence in Summer 2019 (negotiable).

The position is funded by the EU ERA Chairs programme and the initial contract can lasts for 60 months. After that tenure become possible.

ERA Chair programme funding enabled TLU to launch a new initiative titled Cultural Data Analytics (CUDAN) Open Lab (see here: http://cudan.tlu.ee/). The project would enable the new professor to design her/his team consisting of at least 6 senior research fellows and several junior research fellows together with administrative support team. The professor will decide on the research directions of the CUDAN Open Lab team.

In case of interest, please find more information here: https://www.tlu.ee/en/professor-cultural-data-analytics

The deadline of submitting the application documents is 26th February 2019 (including).

DiGRA 2019 - The 12th Digital Games Research Association Conference

Ritsumeikan University (Kyoto, Japan)

6th of August - 10th of August 2019

 

It is our great pleasure to announce the Digital Games Research Association's 2019 Conference call for papers. Papers are invited under the theme 'Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo Mix', where 'media mix' serves as a starting point for considering games' convergence, transformation, replication, and expansion from platform, technology, and context to another.

For more information and updates, please see: http://www.digra2019.org/

Submission deadlines: 

Full Papers, Abstracts, Panels, and Doctoral Consortium: February 5, 2019

Workshops: April 8, 2019

Emiliano Treré

Routledge

This book is an extensive investigation of the complexities, ambiguities and shortcomings of contemporary digital activism. The author deconstructs the reductionism of the literature on social movements and communication, proposing a new conceptual vocabulary based on practices, ecologies, imaginaries and algorithms to account for　the communicative complexity of protest movements. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on social movements, collectives and political parties in Spain, Italy and Mexico, this book disentangles the hybrid nature of contemporary activism. It shows how activists operate merging the physical and the digital, the human and the non-human, the old and the new, the internal and the external, the corporate and the alternative.

The author illustrates the ambivalent character of contemporary digital activism, demonstrating that media imaginaries can be either used to conceal authoritarianism, or to reimagine democracy. The book looks at both side of algorithmic power, shedding light on strategies of repression and propaganda, and scrutinizing manifestations of algorithms as appropriation and resistance.

The author analyses the way in which digital activism is not an immediate solution to intricate political problems, and argues that it can only be effective when a set of favourable social, political, and cultural conditions align.

Assessing whether digital activism can generate and sustain long-term processes of social and political change, this book will be of interest to students and scholars researching radical politics, social movements, digital activism, political participation and current affairs more generally.

Table of content

• Introduction: the quest for communicative complexity within social movements
  
• PART I. Ecologies
  
• Chapter 1. Media ecologies and the media/movement dynamic　
  
• Chapter 2. An ecological exploration of the ‘Anomalous Wave’ movement
  
• Chapter 3. An ecological exploration of the #YoSoy132 movement
  
• PART II. Imaginaries　
  
• Chapter 4. Media imaginaries and the media/movement dynamic
  
• Chapter 5. The authoritarian sublime of the Five Star Movement
  
• Chapter 6. The technopolitical sublime of the Spanish Indignados
  
• PART III. Algorithms
  
• Chapter 7. The mutual shaping of algorithms and social movements　
  
• Chapter 8. Algorithm as propaganda, repression, and paranoia
  
• Chapter 9. Algorithm as knowledge, appropriation, and resistance
  
• Conclusions: hybrid media activism
  

Gender Studies 2019 Conference: On Violence

24th of October – 26th of October 2019

University of Helsinki, Finland

What is violence? How is violence normalized in some contexts? How do gender, sexuality, race, and class, among other axes of power, intersect making some bodies more prone to experiencing violence? How to subvert and challenge different forms of violence, and what are the respectful and nuanced forms of solidarity and activism that take the specificity of people’s experiences into consideration?

We warmly invite scholars from a variety of locations in the Global North and South to participate in the discussions on violence. This conference in Helsinki will approach multiple aspects of violence across the wide multidisciplinary field of gender, sexuality, queer, trans, disability, postcolonial, and critical race studies. The conference is organized and hosted by the Gender Studies Discipline of The University of Helsinki together with the Association for Gender Studies in Finland (SUNS), Incorporating Vulnerability and WeAll projects.

We open workshop submissions from the 7th of January until the 15th of February. We invite you to submit proposals for workshops in English, Finnish or Swedish. In addition to traditional workshop contributions we also welcome other forms of creative collaborations/presentations/performances.

We welcome workshop proposals particularly in (but not limited to) the following themes:

• Theorizing and understanding violence in feminism, queer, trans, postcolonial and disability and critical race studies
• Debates on what counts as violence in feminism and in multidisciplinary gender studies
• Methodology, methods and ethics in researching violence and vulnerable groups
• Approaches and methods for countering, resisting and transforming violence
• Concepts and conceptualizations of gender, violence and agency
• Power/knowledge –violence
• Violence within feminist movements and scholarship
• Normative violence and violence of norms
• Structural violence, colonial and racialized violences and violations, including microaggressions
• Institutional and institutionalized violence, e.g. in organizations, schools, institutions of higher education, hospitals, military, prisons
• Violence(s) and violations as discrimination in working life and in organizations
• Hate speech and violence on-line
• Narrations and representations of violence in fiction, film, literature, art, media
• Political violence, social movements and violence
• Policy and politics on violence
• Mobility, migration, borders
• Experiences of violence
• Compassion and witnessing of violence
• Secondary trauma and self-care of the researcher
• Violence and vulnerabilities in the context of climate change
• Violence against non-human animals
• Societal impact of research on violence: how to influence positive change

Guidelines for Workshop Organizers:

Workshop organizers will be responsible for selecting papers to be presented in the workshops, planning and organizing the workshop, and communicating with the conference team as well as workshop participants. Sessions will be 90 minutes each; which could be divided on three to four paper presentations as well as group discussions. Alternatively, workshop organisers could utilise time differently according to their specific plans. Please note that paper proposals will be submitted directly to workshop organizers to the email provided in the submission form. Organizers will select the papers for the workshops and inform conference team as well as the participants.

Structure of the Conference Application Process:

1) Workshop organizers submit their workshop proposals by the end of 15th of February and are informed of the acceptance by the 21st of February.

2) Confirmed workshops will be published on the conference website on the 28th of February and the call for papers will open on the 1st of March and close on the 31st of March. The conference team will circulate the call for papers and advertise the conference widely.

3) Paper proposals are sent to the workshop organizers directly and they will inform the participants and conference team of the accepted papers by the 17th of April. The accepted abstracts will be submitted to the conference team for the book of abstracts.

Workshop Submission Details:

Submit an abstract of your workshop (max 2000 characters with spaces), title, keywords, short bio (max 1000 characters with spaces), a chair/chairs, a discussant, and a list of themes for potential papers. Fill in the submission form: 

https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/94401/lomake.html

Important Dates:

• Workshop submission deadline: 15th of February 2019
  
• Workshop acceptance notifications: 21st of February 2019
  
• Call for papers: 1st of March 2019 – 31st of March 2019
  
• Paper acceptance notifications to the participants and conference team 17th of April
  

For more information and updates, please visit the conference websites.