[Air-l] [Fwd: CFP: Community (6/15/05; e-journal issue)]

[jespert]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: CFP: Community (6/15/05; e-journal issue)
Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 19:42:43 +0100
From: Joanna Zylinska <j.zylinska at virgin.net>
To: cfp at english.upenn.edu



Electronic journal Culture Machine invites submissions for its special
2006 COMMUNITY issue.

Culture Machine  is an international,
open access, peer-reviewed electronic journal whose aim is to promote
original, exploratory work in the areas of cultural studies and critical
theory. It seeks to generate possibilities for new areas of
interdisciplinary inquiry.

In recent years, the notion of the community has emerged as an important
as well as contested field of cultural and theoretical exploration.  In
his influential study Imagined Communities (1983), social anthropologist
Benedict Anderson discusses the concept of the community as it is
related to the idea of the nation.  As an imagined cultural and
political artifact, 
the nation
 provides a collectivity with a sense of
continuity and cohesiveness, while concealing the foundational violence
that underlies such collective myth.  While Andersons articulation of
the community is still largely circumscribed by the political concept of
the nation state, philosophical inquiries into the notion of the
community by Jean-Luc Nancy (The Inoperative Community, 1983), Maurice
Blanchot (The Unavowable Community, 1983) and Giorgio Agamben (The
Coming Community, 1993), seek to open it up toward a broader
politico-ethical context.  Nancys call for the deconstruction of the
immanent community has been particularly influential: community as the
dominant Western political formation, founded upon a totalizing,
exclusionary myth of national unity, must be tirelessly 
unworked
 in
order to accommodate more inclusive and fluid forms of dwelling together
in the world, of being-in-common.

In this issue, we propose to engage in multiple explorations of the
community as a socio-historical, politico-ethical and cultural
construct.
* With the demise of the traditional community as related to the
nation-state, what alternative formations or new collectivities, bound
together by a very different nexus of belonging, have emerged in its
stead?
* How viable is the metaphor of the 
global
 community (the global
village)?
* Can the community be predicated on the ethical, perhaps cosmopolitan
vision of sharing and unimpeded border-crossing, or is it, on the
contrary, yet another homogenizing, totalizing fantasy that only
benefits the empire of the capital?
* How does it relate to such increasingly unstable concepts as

citizenship
 or 
multiculturalism
?
* What is the function of the community in the rapidly shifting
geopolitical context, of which the European community is a particularly
fecund contemporary example, as is a plethora of its postcolonial,
post-Western articulations (in the Middle East and Africa, for
instance)?
* Is there community after communism?
* To what extent does Hardt and Negri's 
multitude
 (Empire, 2004;
Multitude, 2004) represent a new form of community (one made up of a
multiplicity of singularities)?
* Among the newly emergent formations, the notion of 
the virtual
community
 is of particular interest. We would like to investigate the
virtual communities that have mushroomed in numerous guises: as both
cultural avant-garde and cultural decadence; as the mainstay of
political conservatism (white supremacy networks) and the forum for
politically progressive forces (international peace coalitions).
* Finally, are we perhaps moving towards the 
unworking
 of the
community to a degree when it ceases to be a 
workable
 concept
altogether?

In reflecting on the notion of community, this special issue of Culture
Machine also aspires to become a meeting place for the community of
minds; indeed, a site of community in its most basic sense of
communication and circulation of meaning.

Please send an abstract of 500-750 words to Dr. Dorota Glowacka, at
.

1. The deadline for submitting abstracts is June 15, 2005. All
contributors will be notified soon after the deadline whether their
abstract has been selected.
2. The deadline for completed papers is October 20, 2005. All papers
will be peer-reviewed.

--
Dr Joanna Zylinska
Department of Media and Communications
Goldsmiths College, University of London
New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK



-- 
Jesper Tække - MA. Ph.D.-Student - IT University of Copenhagen - Dept. of Digital Aesthetics & Communication -  Rued Langgaards Vej 7 - DK-2300 Copenhagen S - Phone +45 7218 5000 - Direct +45 7218 5037 - Fax +45 7218 5001 - http://home16.inet.tele.dk/jesper_t/  - e-mail: jespert at itu.dk