[Air-L] Updates! #CFP Contested Visibilities | ECREA DCC, GSC and VC sections | Lisbon

[Ana Marta M. Flores]

Dear all,

We send this email about the ECREA off-year conference "Contested
Visibilities: Everyday politics and online imaginaries of the body”,
co-organised by the Digital Culture and Communication, Gender, Sexuality
and Communication and Visual Cultures sections and their YECREA
representatives.

The event will now have the keynotes confirmed and information about fees.

Contested Visibilities will occur at Lusófona University, in Lisbon
(Portugal), from 6-8 September 2023.

Further information is below.

If you have any questions or need any kind of information, please let us
know.


On behalf of Contested Visibilities organisation team,

Ana Marta M. Flores

Ana Marta M. Flores <http://www.anamartaflores.com/>
Communication Officer
ECREA DCC section



—--------

Contested Visibilities: Everyday politics and online imaginaries of the body

co-organised by the Digital Culture and Communication, Gender, Sexuality
and Communication and Visual Cultures ECREA’s sections and their YECREA
representatives.


6-8 September 2023, Lusófona University, Lisbon, Portugal

Contested Visibilities: Everyday politics and online imaginaries of the body

While in the early days of the internet, the digital was often seen as
purely virtual and detached from the experience of human embodiment, our
current online landscape has challenged this view. Social media seems to
have awakened the urge to share images of our bodies. These shared visual
representations contribute to the creation of individual and collective
identities. They are tools of meaning-making and belonging in a highly
mediatised world. Their visibility can be part of advertising campaigns,
everyday interactions, intimate practices, activist engagement and many
other affective practices. These are situated in digital cultures of affect
and their inherent normativity is governed not only by social norms but
also by the particular possibilities and algorithmic rules of platforms.

Contested online environments have also become terrain for contemporary
social justice movements and activists who both respond to and use online
visual representations for their actions. These hybrid activist practices
rely on embodied representations and combine online and offline activities.
While online spaces enable important visibility, this visibility also
carries risks and raises questions about who prefers not to be visible and
what practices of resistance can be adopted. Digital participation is
inextricably linked to embodied characteristics (e.g., gender, ethnicity,
social class, age, (dis)ability or others). These intersecting identities
can shape digital experiences enabling them to both liberate and oppress
individuals and communities.

Keynote speakers


   -

   Daniela Jaramillo-Dent | University of Zurich

Daniela Jaramillo-Dent is an internet scholar with research and teaching
expertise on migration, digital media, and social justice. Her research has
explored algorithmic (in)visibility, minority representation and inequality
in digital platforms. She has contributed to and held leadership roles in
research projects at the local, national and European levels. She has
international teaching experience in fields related to digital inequality,
research methods and media literacy and has led teaching innovation
projects and training workshops for innovative teaching in Higher Education.



   -

   Marloes Geboers | University of Amsterdam

Marloes Geboers’ work revolves around the visuality of warfare as produced
within and through platforms and their fast-evolving participatory
modalities. Her dissertation focused on platform affective affordances and
their role in constructing regimes of visibility relating to the Syrian
war. Alongside these topics, she authored work on platform-afforded digital
violence aimed at journalists. She blends digital methods and automated
image analyses in order to study performative expressions that replicate,
imitate or subvert propaganda narratives in more or less tactical ways.
These user practices shape and are shaped by platform vernaculars that have
a profound impact on the way we see and experience war within contemporary
media ecologies. Marloes has a background in political science (MA) and
journalism (BA), and she has teaching experience in digital methods and the
ethics of AI.

Katrin Tiinberg | Tallinn University

Katrin Tiidenberg works at the Baltic Film, Media and Arts School of
Tallinn University as a Professor of Participatory Culture. Her research
focuses on the hows and whys of people's social media practices, with a
particular emphasis on visuality, sex and political participation. The
overarching questions she tends to ask are about identity, community, norms
and power. She is currently wrapping up a research project on the
platformization of sexuality (Rethinking Sexuality) and the role of the
internet in young people’s political participation (DigiGen) and has just
started a project on visual digital trust (TRAVIS).

Call for Papers

The conference will include different formats for presentation on topics
related to contested visibilities, everyday politics and online imaginaries
of the body. We welcome individual submissions for oral presentations,
which will be arranged in thematic sessions by the organising team. We also
welcome submissions in alternative and creative formats, proposals may
include video, audio, images, text, hyperlinks and multimedia that
illustrate your reflections in the proposal.

We are interested in abstracts that address the complexity of online
representations of bodies and/or related visual practices (e.g., producing,
perceiving, curating, circulating) through case studies, theoretical,
empirical or methodological approaches. We strongly encourage submissions
that take an intersectional approach and address embodiment in relation to
social factors such as gender, sexuality, age, class, race/ethnicity,
disability, and nationality.

We are open to contributions from scholars at all career stages
(early-career scholars are especially invited to participate), artists,
activists, and media producers.

We look forward to submissions on (but not limited to) the following topics:

* The use of digital media for feminist, queer, anti-racist, anti-ageist,
anti-ableist, anti-classist, neurodiversity, or illness-related activism
and the returning critique of the normative body;

* Reactionary visualities to the above activism and hate speech/imaginaries
"against the woke";

* The intertwinement of socio-cultural imaginaries with platform cultures;

* Chances and limits of hybridisation of commercial culture, strategies of
self-branding and body activism;

* Practical experiments with methods attuned to the 'online-groundedness'
of social body images (e.g., body-image dominated platforms such as TikTok
or Instagram);

* Impact of online representation of bodies in various fields such as
sports, memory cultures, advertising, fan/pop cultures, etc;

* Augmented technologies of filtering, avatars and their significance for
identity and meaning-making;

* Images shared without consent, images that reproduce stereotypes and
resistance by minority communities;

* Images produced by media and news organisations as part of their work,
which are ultimately criticised for 'othering'/stereotyping communities,
and the activism involved;

* Online communities as sites of political pedagogy and critique of
mainstream/traditional media's stereotyping of the body;

* Dialectical dialogues about the body in the online sphere:
metadiscourses, beefs, videos about videos, Tiktok reframings;

* Gendered and sexua(lised) digital/online representations of embodied
diversity, difference and intersectionality;

* Critical analysis of the relationships between digital spheres and
gendered and sexual(ised) performativity, resistance and defiance;

* Representations of bodies in relation to technology and artificial
intelligence;

Abstracts

Please submit your proposal (300-500 words) until 15 May, 23:59 (CET) using
the form at <https://bit.ly/ContestedVisibilities> and highlight how your
work relates to the conference topic, methods used, and perspectives you
would like to bring to the discussion. In addition to the thematic
sessions, the conference will also facilitate practical tutorials dedicated
to creative/situated/ethical approaches to digital platforms and visual
data.

Workshop
In addition, our YECREA team offers an online pre-conference workshop for
early-career scholars focusing on research challenges (ethics, data access,
collection, analysis etc.) via Zoom on Monday, 4 September 2023. This event
will offer ECRs the opportunity to present their work in progress. If you
wish to participate in the ECR pre-conference event, please submit an
abstract of 200-300 words at <https://bit.ly/workshopContestedVisibilities>,
briefly describing your current project and research challenges, e.g. in
regard to research ethics, data collection, access, or analysis. The
accepted participants will engage in facilitated peer discussions based on
their submissions. Participation in the pre-conference YECREA workshop can
be independent of participation in the conference. Please indicate how you
would like to participate by 15 May, 23:59 (CET). Participation in the
online workshop is free of charge.

Fees

The fee includes buffet lunches and tea/coffee breaks during the three-day
conference.

non-members

100€

ECREA members and Lusófona students

80€

Early career Researchers

60€

Registration opens in early July and will be processed via the Eventbrite
platform.


Organisation

This ECREA conference is co-organised by the Digital Culture and
Communication, Gender, Sexuality and Communication and Visual Cultures
sections and their YECREA representatives.

Hosted and sponsored by Lusófona University.

The conference is partially supported by funding from the European Union’s
Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie
Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement Nº 101059460.

For questions, please send an email to
<ContestedVisibilities2023[at]gmail[dot]com>

More info at <https://dccecrea.wordpress.com> and <
https://www.ecrea.eu/event-5192002?CalendarViewType=1&SelectedDate=9/13/2023
>

Important dates

* The deadline for submissions for abstracts is Monday 15 May 2023, 23:59
(CET).

* We will notify all contributors if their proposal has been accepted or
not by the end of June.

* Registration for the conference will be open in early July.

* The event will take place on 6-8 September 2023, at Lusófona University
Lisbon.