[Air-L] CfP: EASA Media Anthropology Network Workshop "The Digital Turn in Media Anthropology"

[sahana udupa]

Dear all

Apologies for cross-posting

Below you find the call for papers/abstracts for the Media Anthropology
Network Workshop on the 11th of October 2019 in Munich. Deadline for
submissions is the 1st of June.

Best wishes.

****

CfP: European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Media
Anthropology Network Workshop "The Digital Turn in Media Anthropology"

Organizers

Prof. Sahana Udupa (Ludwig Maximilian University Munich)
Dr. Elisabetta Costa (University of Groningen)
Dr. Philipp Budka (University of Vienna)

Date & Venue

11 October 2019
Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich, Germany

By building on the Media Anthropology Network panel at the EASA 2018
conference in Stockholm and the follow-up e-seminar from 16 Oct. - 9
Nov. 2018 (http://www.media-anthropology.net/index.php/e-seminars), this
workshop critically explores “the digital turn” in the anthropological
study of media, and aims to push further ethnographic knowledge into the
role that digital media technologies play in people's everyday life and
broader sociopolitical transformations. In so doing, this workshop
contributes to the reassessment of media anthropology in digital times,
and raises critical questions on how digital media have posed new
epistemological challenges, inspired methodological innovations, and
offered opportunities for political activism for media anthropologists.
A key question that drives this discussion is whether the digital turn
has reconfigured the classic distinction between “home” and “field”
through temporally intensified “horizontal” networks on a global scale.
Have these connections – culturally translated across different
societies – collapsed the distinction between “home” and “field”? As
users and researchers of digital media, how do we rework anthropology’s
classic conundrum of home-field, distance-nearness and us-other in
radically progressive ways? What does the “digital turn” entail in terms
of how we engage research participants, and how do we use these new
pathways to critique the multidirectional “colonial matrix of power”
(Mignalo & Walsh, 2007) that is riding on the very infrastructure of
contemporary digital media?

We invite scholars to engage with these questions through various topic
fields they are researching, and consider this reflexive move as an
important step towards challenging “the global fact” of racial, gender,
ethnic and religion-based exclusions. We also invite scholars to bring
cases of innovative use of digital research to overcome prevailing
hierarchies in anthropological knowledge production – between
researchers and research participants, as well as within the academic
community.

Drawing from their own research, and from their engagement with relevant
literatures, workshop participants will ask the following questions:

  *      What is the present state of anthropological study on digital
    media technologies and their impact on culture and society?
  *      What are the main questions in need of urgent research
    (especially in connection to decolonizing media/digital
    anthropology, gender, visuality, extreme movements and speech)?
  *      How have digital technologies transformed (media) anthropology
    and how does the future look for media anthropologists?
  *      What is the role of digital technology in transforming
    knowledge production and dissemination in media anthropology?
  *      How can anthropologists contribute to the interdisciplinary
    effort of theorizing digital media practices and digital technologies?
  *      Who will be the main beneficiaries of this research, both in
    academia and beyond?

We invite ethnographic and/or theoretical papers that focus on the above
questions.

Participants who need travel support to attend the workshop are invited
to mention the same (limited financial support is available for travel
and accommodation).

In a single word document, please send your abstracts of 1000 words and
a short bio (100 words) stating your current affiliation, mentioning
whether you are an EASA member.
Please use the filename format: authorlastname_digitalturnworkshop2019,
and send this no later than 1 June 2019 to
digitalturnworkshop at ethnologie.lmu.de

Selected participants will be notified by 30 June 2019. EASA members
will get the first preference in travel bursaries.