[Air-L] Last minute: CfP Dicital Culture and Communication Ecrea Workshop

[Elisenda Ardèvol]

Digital Culture: Promises and Discomforts

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 13, 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.

More information on the conference venue and registration will be
published here and at dccecrea2013.uni-bonn.de

Elisenda Ardevol
http://dccecrea.wordpress.com/