[Air-L] Fwd: CFP WAVES, BITS AND BRICKS: Media & The Production of Urban Space

[christina dunbar-hester]

Apologies for x-posting

CFP: WAVES, BITS AND BRICKS: Media & The Production of Urban Space
First Monday Special Issue

Deadline for Abstracts: Friday, 16 May 2012
Deadline for Papers: Friday, 28 September 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS The ECREA Temporary Working Group “Media & The City”, the ARC
Research Centre at the Catholic University of Milan and First Monday
are happy to announce
their collaboration for a special issue of First Monday titled WAVES,
BITS AND BRICKS: Media
& The Production of Urban Space, scheduled for publication in
mid-2013. Matteo Tarantino and
Simone Tosoni of Milan Catholic University will work with Edward
Valauskas, Chief Editor of
First Monday, as special editors.

TOPICS As the majority of the world population has come to live in
cities, urban space is ever
more central as resource, commodity and medium. During the twentieth
century Henri Lefebvre
paved the way for the understanding of the social production of urban
space as a complex and
manifold process in which spatial representations, spatial practices
and spatial physicality
continuously interact. These interactions can also be influenced,
mediated, negotiated or
otherwise impacted by communication technologies, which thus become
integral parts in
processes of sociospatial production.

Possible examples include: how technologies of geo-localization and
related practices are re-
shaping spaces for nightlife in contemporary cities; how metropolitan
areas negotiate their social
image among multiple processes of bottom-up (emerging, “grassroots”)
and top-down
(“branding”) representation; how mobile communication technologies
entail new practices of
walking and driving which contribute to re-shape transportation
spaces; how new forms of
Internet-based urban gaming are “gamifying” practices of cure of urban
spaces (e.g. cleaning or
planting flowers) rewarded through virtual “points”; the complex
interplay between media
representations, policies and social actors in the shaping and
reshaping of contested urban
spaces; the use of ICT in the planning and management of urban space.
The list could go on
indefinitely.

WAVES, BITS AND BRICKS intends to focus precisely on these forms of
interplay, with the
objective of charting how media concretely impact on urban spaces in
different geographical
and historical contexts. As such, approaches disjointed from their
concrete impact on spatial
production (e.g. taxonomies of city representations in cinema or
analyses of mobile
communications focused on users alone) are discouraged. As the
relationships between media
and sociospatial production can be approached through a variety of
paradigms, contributions
are encouraged from fields such as planning and architecture,
semiotics, science & technology
studies, urban sociology and anthropology, communication studies.

Empirical and theoretical contributions are welcome, as are critical
reviews of existing
approaches to the media/sociospatial production nexus.

SUBMISSIONS Contributors are invited to first submit abstracts to
Matteo Tarantino (matteo
{dot} tarantino {AT} unicatt.it) and Simone Tosoni (simone {dot}
tosoni {AT} unicatt.it), who will
be happy to provide editorial assistance. Deadline for abstracts
submission is Friday, 16 May
2012.

Authors of accepted papers will be notified via email by May 31th
2012. Abstracts will have to
be in English, about 500 words of length and containing clear
theoretical and methodological
outlines.

Deadline for full text submission is Friday 28 September 2012. Papers’
length will be around
5,000 words.

Papers will then undergo double-blind peer-review, and authors will be
notified with the
reviewers’ comments by December 15th 2012. Deadline for the submission
of final, revised
papers is Friday 15 February 2013. Guidelines for authors can be found
on the First Monday
Web
site
at
http://www.firstmonday.org/guidelines.html.

Media & The City is a Temporary Working Group established in 2011
within ECREA to gather
scholars working on the multi-faceted relationship between cities and
communications.
http://Twg.ecrea.eu/MC.

ARC is a research center on Cultural Change at the Catholic University
of Milan, working on the
transformations currently investing economics, cities, welfare systems
and institutions.

First Monday is one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed
journals on the Internet, solely
devoted to the Internet. Since its start in May 1996, First Monday has
published 1,177 papers in
190 issues, written by 1,543 different authors. First Monday is
indexed in Communication
Abstracts, Computer & Communications Security Abstracts, INSPEC, ISI’s
Web of Knowledge,
LISA, PAIS, eGranary Digital Library, and other services.
http://www.firstmonday.org/

Matteo Tarantino
Catholic University Of the Sacred Heart
Largo Gemelli 1 20123 Milan, ITALY
t: +39 02 7234 3765
matteo {DOT} tarantino {AT} unicatt.it

Simone Tosoni
Catholic University Of the Sacred Heart
Largo Gemelli 1 20123 Milan, ITALY
t: +39 02 7234 3765
simone {DOT} tosoni {AT} unicatt.it

--
Christina Dunbar-Hester, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Journalism & Media Studies
Affiliated Faculty, Women's & Gender Studies
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/directory/christdh/index.html

National Science Foundation Fellow, 2011-2012
Media, Culture & Communication
New York University