[Air-L] #CFP | Contested Visibilities: Everyday politics and online imaginaries of the body | ECREA DCC, GSC and VC sections

[Ana Marta M. Flores]

Dear all,

We are happy to announce 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 take place at Lusófona University, in Lisbon (Portugal),
from 6-8 September 2023.

Further information is below.


On behalf of the organisation team,


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




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**CALL FOR PAPERS**

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.


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

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.

Format

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.


**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/2023/02/24/contested-visibilities>

**Timeline**

* The deadline for submissions 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.