[Air-L] CFP: Haptic Media Studies - Extended Deadline

[Jason Archer]

*CFP: Haptic Media Studies*

Call for papers for a themed issue of NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY

Guest editors: David Parisi, Mark Paterson, and Jason Archer

Abstracts due (400-500 words): November 8, 2015



Interacting with, navigating, and manipulating media has always depended on
touch--whether turning pages, folding paper, depressing buttons, typing on
keys, or twisting knobs, there is always an act of touching at the heart of
mediated communication.  The recent rise of touchscreen and gestural
interfaces, mobile computing, video gaming, wearable communication devices,
and emerging virtual reality platforms disrupts the previous material
stability of these media interfaces, prompting the adoption of new,
embodied navigational habits.  At the material level, we now touch media in
novel ways, becoming accustomed to their shape, size, texture, temperature,
and weight, while also learning to be receptive to the signals media
objects transmit to us through a hitherto seemingly dormant tactile
channel.



Media Studies, under the sway of an ocularcentrism operating in western
culture more broadly, has long neglected considerations of touch, however.
Insofar as it does attend to hapticality or tactility, the discipline
frequently mobilizes an ideologically-loaded, intuitionistic theory that
assigns this sense modality an essential set of immutable physiological
qualities.  Unlike visuality, which admits of some complexity with regard
to the modality of sight and its dominance in the sensory hierarchy,
especially within dedicated fields of scholarship such as ‘visual culture’,
hapticality seems by contrast unwavering and constant, grounded in the
body’s stable biological reality.  Lacking a formalized, comprehensive,
empirically-grounded account of touch’s historical and cultural life, Media
Studies feeds forward the idea that touch is physiologically immediate and
by its nature experiential, and consequently exists outside of—and
above—history and culture.  By contrast, empirically-informed accounts of
touch outside of Media Studies render altogether different, and far more
dynamic, conceptions of touch: Sensory Anthropology, Art History, Literary
Theory, Computer Science, Education, Cognitive Science, and Architecture
each approach touch with priorities and biases idiosyncratic to their
fields.



It is to foster a tradition of Media Studies that locates touch at the
starting point of its analysis that we seek contributions around the theme
of Haptic Media Studies.  Like the fields of Sound Studies and Visual
Culture before it, a touch-oriented media studies emerges as “an
intellectual reaction to changes in culture and technology” (Sterne, “Sonic
Imaginations,” 3). Our project here is to reconsider or rewrite extant
accounts of media and thereby emphasize a previously-neglected sensory
dimension of mediatic experience.  Inevitably, such a reorientation will
involve a new set of theoretical questions, historical considerations,
interdisciplinary connections, and research methods to arrive at a
theoretically literate and empirically-grounded understanding of mediatic
touch.  At the outset of this endeavor, then, it is tempting to offer a
haptocentric Media Studies as a counterpoint to the ocularcentric, and more
recently, aural-centric ones that it attempts to displace. Instead, perhaps
we think of this not so much as a displacement through re-centering, but as
a new orientation for Media Studies that prompts us to be attentive to the
haptic relations always already at the core of mediatic experiences. By
advancing a touch-oriented tradition of Media Studies we hope to help make
the field adequate to the shifting configuration of media interfacing
practices, expanding its borders outward to encompass a sensory modality
previously treated in a largely haphazard and piecemeal fashion. Further,
by building upon and synthesizing the accounts of touch scattered
throughout the works of media and communication theorists such as Marshall
McLuhan, John Durham Peters, Mark B. N. Hansen, Richard Grusin, W. J. T.
Mitchell, and Erkki Huhtamo, this new orientation to the haptic positions
Media Studies to productively contribute to the conversations about touch
that occur outside its disciplinary borders.



*Possible topics include, but are not limited to:*

            - Touchscreen remediations of ‘old’ media interfaces (print,
radio, television, telephone, telegraph, typewriter)

            - Triangulations of gender, media, and touch

            - Touch’s role in mobile and location-based digital media

            - Haptics and past/present/future virtual reality systems
(especially at the dawn of a new generation of VR products - Oculus, HTC
Vive, Morpheus/PlayStation VR)

            - Tactile and haptic aspects of predigital and 'dead' media
interfaces (buttons, keys, knobs, dials, sliders, levers, pages)

            - Submodalities and divisions of touch (active/passive;
cutaneous/kinaesthetic)

            - Accepted/assumed divisions between touch and the other senses


            - Assumed hierarchies of the senses

            - Cybersex/teledildonics and technologies of mediated sexuality
(Vivid’s CyberSex Suit, the RealTouch, OhMiBod)

            - Haptic interface and haptic display technologies, including
scientific, aesthetic, medical, and cultural applications

            - Semiotic functions of touch in media

            - Formal and informal regulations around communicative or
social touching

            - Touch and tactility in videogames

            - Tactile/haptic/gestural metaphors/iconography operating in
digital media (e.g. ‘poking,’ ‘thumbs up’)

            - The role of haptic aesthetics in considerations of media
design

            - Cross-cultural comparisons of media touch

            - Media, touch, and disability (e.g. sensory substitution
systems, prosthetics)

            - Changes in touch practices associated with touch-oriented
media (e.g. children’s altered tactile engagement with non-digital forms of
visual media due to the use of touchscreen)

            - The tactile Internet


Please send abstracts (400-500 words) to David Parisi (parisid[at]cofc.edu)
and Jason Archer (jarche2[at]uic.edu) by Sunday, November 8.  The editors
will invite full papers from selected submissions by mid-November, with
full papers of 6000-8000 words to be submitted for editorial review by
February 15.  It is anticipated that the special issue will be published
online by late 2016, and in print by mid 2017.