[Air-L] CFP: new feminisms/new materialisms/new media

[Tamara Kneese]

*CFP: The 2015 Neil Postman Graduate Conference *

*Department of Media, Culture, and Communication*

*New York University *

*new feminisms / new materialisms / new media *

CFP Deadline: Monday November 3, 2014
Conference Date: Thursday March 12, 2015

*Keynote:* Karen Barad
<http://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/faculty/singleton.php?&singleton=true&cruz_id=kbarad>*,
Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of
Consciousness, **University
of California at Santa Cruz*

After excursions into clouds, networks, and virtual worlds, the study of
culture and media has taken a materialist turn. Media archaeologists,
Marxists, ecologists, and designers rightly insist on a return to things,
infrastructures, and the environment. But this once-firm ground now teems
with vital forces, nonhuman agencies, and quantum particles.

This renewed interest in materiality should not be seen as a return or
revival; rather, the project of new materialisms shows how what Jane
Bennett calls “vibrant matter” is applicable to salient political and
ethical concerns in the 21st century. Feminist and queer theorists, long
interested in questions of the body and matter, are developing accounts of
materiality and relationality that challenge received hierarchies of
language and representation, subject and object. Feminist scholar Karen
Barad, for example, emphasizes the irreducible relationality of phenomena:
“relata do not preexist relations.” [1] Both new materialisms and media
studies examine objects not as independent entities, but as centers of
interaction and mediation. Alexander Galloway, for instance, asks “that we
think of media not so much as objects but as principles of mediation.” [2]

We convene this conference in order to foreground feminism and situate new
materialisms in relation to ongoing questions in media studies. How might
we develop relational understandings of technology and infrastructures? How
do new materialisms change our notions of the body, labor, and sociality?
What critical and political approaches to agency, personhood, and mediation
might emerge? Our deliberate use of the adjective “new” in the title should
be seen as a provocation to uncover continuities with “old” materialisms,
develop feminist and materialist media histories, and to historicize
current debates.

We invite papers from across a range of disciplines that address new
materialisms in their many forms and functions. Possible topics areas
include (but are not limited to):

- Feminist and queer media archeology
- Feminist histories of science and technology
- Nature, culture, and the environment
- “Immaterial,” relational, and affective labor
- Critical race theory and intersectional approaches
- Theories of embodiment, wearable, or ubiquitous media
- Marxist materialisms
- Media, architecture, and infrastructures
- Assemblage theories from Deleuze to Latour
- Agency and personhood
- Feminist and queer phenomenologies
- Feminist design
- Queer computing and feminist approaches to social media

The New York University Department of Media, Culture, and Communication
invites graduate students, academics, activists, workers, and artists to
submit conference paper proposals. The conference will be held on March 12,
2015 at NYU.

Paper proposal submissions (no more than 300 words) should be sent by *Monday
November 3, 2014* to postman.nyu at gmail.com (with "Call for Papers" in the
subject).

*Karen Barad* is Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of
Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad's Ph.D.
is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Barad held a
tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more
interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of *Meeting the Universe
Halfway: Quantum Physics* and the *Entanglement of Matter and Meaning*
(Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of
physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and
feminist theory. Barad is the Co-Director of the Science & Justice Graduate
Training Program at UCSC.


[1] Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of
How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
28, no. 3 (2003), 815.

[2] Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012),
120.