[Air-L] ECREA Digital Culture - extended deadline 15.5.2013

Jessica Einspänner jei at ifk.uni-bonn.de
Tue Apr 16 06:03:05 PDT 2013


ECREA Digital Culture and Communication

Call for Papers – Digital Culture: Promises and Discomforts

EXTENDED DEADLINE: May, 15

The ongoing mediatisation process is subject to social transformations 
as well as technical innovation processes and creative practices. We 
endorse digital technologies with the promises of a better way of 
life, solving our problems of managing the world’s complexity, 
allowing better participatory policies and helping us in our daily 
life. At the same time, however, we are confronted with the 
fundamental problems of technological structures, such as the problems 
of Internet surveillance, control and the unequal distribution of 
power on the Web. Looking at digital cultures as a driving force of 
social change, we find ourselves confronted with a variety of 
contradictory images of digital culture and its possible futures.

In this workshop we want to critically discuss the promises and 
discomforts of digital culture taking into account the tensions raised 
by different material practices, understandings and social orders 
around the role of digital media in performing social change. Special 
focus lies on the three aspects of Digital Culture:

(1) Digital imaginations and narratives
The images of future are drawn in tecno-scapes, like in 
science-fiction films, artificial intelligence designs, virtual worlds 
or metaverses. What kinds of individuals, societies and environments 
are imagined through the growing pervasiveness of Digital Culture into 
our lives? How digital imaginaries shape our experience and relate to 
our ways of narrating ourselves and our creative practices? What are 
the role of innovation, creative industries and urbanlabs in the 
design of the future and in the different kinds of social 
intervention? How digital imagination is performing new narrative 
forms as well as transforming knowledge production and sharing?

(2) Digital Neighbourhoods and Citizenship
Among the existing networked digital technologies it is smartphones 
and tablet computers, which are becoming increasingly popular at an 
extraordinary pace. These devices not only make digital media 
applications truly ubiquitous but also create an abundance of digital 
location-sensitive information, which saturates local places, social 
relations, and the perception and organisation of neighbourhoods. The 
concept of space turns into a mash-up of  material and digital places, 
creating new forms of the social while at the same time renegotiating 
the cultural and political logics of local/global or private/public. 
How does the use of digital media trigger new social phenomena, such 
as altered forms and modes of communication, collaboration, 
consumption, infrastructure, mobility or public service?

(3) Digital Engagement and Social Change
Digital engagement manifests itself in a broad range of digital 
practices. People discursively engage through and with digital media 
and thus dissolve spatial, temporal and social boundaries. Especially 
a few popular commercial social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, 
are presumed to play a crucial role in the process of social change by 
means of interaction and connectivity. On a political dimension, 
citizens and activists voice their opinions, discuss political issues, 
organize and mobilize for protest in new or alternative public 
spheres. However, it remains unclear, whether and in which 
differentiations digital media engagement affects established power 
relations and thus promotes social change. Which diverse forms of 
political engagement unfold in digital media environments? How can 
underlying technological and power structures of media be rendered 
visible and to what extent do they affect the possibilities and 
boundaries of digital engagement?

We welcome papers picking up any of the described issues and topics 
and we will also consider contributions related with digital forms of 
social intervention, art projects or urbanlabs proposals. Extended 
abstracts should be no longer than 700 words, written in English and 
contain a clear outline of the argument, the theoretical framework, 
methodology and results (if applicable). Participants may submit more 
than one proposal, but only one paper by the same first author might 
be accepted. Panel and paper proposals from PhD students and early 
career scholars are particularly welcome. All proposals should be 
submitted by May 15, 2013 to ecreadigitalculture at gmail.com. 
Notifications of acceptance will be sent out after June 30, 2013.

Keynote Speakers

We are delighted to announce the following two keynote speakers:

Annette Markham (Umeå University, Sweden) – topic to be announced
Jakob Svensson (Karlstad University, Sweden) will give a lecture on 
“New Media for Development”

The workshop will take place at the Department of Media Studies of the 
University of Bonn, Germany
Poppelsdorfer Allee 47, 53115, Bonn.

The conference date is October 2nd – 5th, 2013.

find more information on:
dccecrea2013.uni-bonn.de
http://dccecrea.wordpress.com



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