[Air-L] CFP: Critical Perspectives on Global/Local Tensions in New Media

[Ben Aslinger]

This anthology seeks to add to scholarship on the cultural geography  
of new media networks and products and the tensions between the  
“global” and the “local” by examining a range of new media case  
studies. This project considers new media practices, texts, services,  
software, policies, infrastructures, and design discourses that enrich  
existing relationships between creative industries and cultures of  
production, reception, and engagement.

We seek papers with prose and diction appropriate for the  
undergraduate classroom but that are also sophisticated enough to be  
read by beginning graduate students.  While we are open to case  
studies that illuminate new commercial and sociocultural practices and  
debates in any national context, we are particularly interested in  
papers that examine intersections of the global and the local outside  
of Western Europe and the industrializing nations of the Asia-Pacific  
region.  Despite this project’s basis in the English language, we are  
interested in incorporating authorial voices and topics from a variety  
of national, regional, and subnational perspectives.

We seek papers that address one or more of the following subject areas:

analog and digital media forms in the global market
the role of new media in constructing “media capitals”
the role of new media platforms in addressing diasporic audiences
challenges of defining the local in the face of complex intersections  
with the global
debates surrounding media globalization in a specific local contexts
the construction of dominant models of web design and definitions of  
“quality” web aesthetics
vernacular design aesthetics that resist hegemonic these models
cultural policy and new media industries
global/local visions of the future of computing and digital  
communication
localized internet and mobile cultures, practices, industries, and  
technologies
interrogations of the global, local, cosmopolitan, hybrid, or glocal  
in regard to new media
development strategies and new media infrastructures
multi-scalar digital divides
global/local perspectives on gaming cultures or game development
experiences of place through new media
new media networks and nodes
economies of import and export

Please send a 250-word abstract with a preliminary bibliography by  
September 1st to either Ben Aslinger (Bentley University, Waltham, MA,  
USA, baslinger at bentley.edu) or Germaine Halegoua (University of  
Wisconsin-Madison, USA, grhalegoua at gmail.com).  Our plan is for all  
5000-word commissioned papers to be due by March 31, 2011.