[Air-L] CFP -- Digital Platforms and Agency -- Lateral Special Section (Deadline: June 30, 2023)

[Reed VS]

Read call here: https://csalateral.org/upcoming/#digital-platforms-agency

500 word abstracts due by *June 30, 2023 *to
digitalplatformsandagency at gmail.com.

How do digital platforms shape our agency, and how do we shape digital
platforms in turn? What is the role of digital platforms in forming our
social, cultural, and political practices?  How and whom do digital
platforms (dis)empower? This special section of Lateral invites scholars
from diverse fields to advance critical cultural inquiry at the convergence
of platforms and agency on digital, networked, and/or new media.

A digital platform is a standard which facilitates computational
interactions between users and systems, according to Ian Bogost. Ubiquitous
but self-effacing, platforms increasingly mediate the constitution and
expression of consciousness. Troubling clean divisors between humanity and
technology, platforms pose a challenge to monolithic, individuated, and
humanist notions of agency that the field of cultural studies is uniquely
poised to address.

Thus, this section calls for scholars to attend to the ways in which
platforms differentially amplify, accelerate, diminish, and subvert the
agency of users, systems, and communities. We see this work following Beth
Coleman’s characterization of networked agency as “the disruptive
technology of our time” which troubles clean divisors between
human/nonhuman, virtual/actual, and individual/system. This section will
deepen Coleman’s provocation by demystifying discrepancies of access,
leverage, and capacity that characterize the emergence of platforms within
our stratified political system.

We seek a diverse collection of essays that reflect the interdisciplinarity
of cultural studies and platform studies. We encourage submissions from
myriad traditions and approaches including media studies, political
economy, performance studies, communication, composition, science and
technology studies, gender studies, sociology, computer science, and more.

Contributions to this session may, for instance:

   - Evaluate the entanglement of platform cultures within the politics of
   representation and regimes of symbolic violence
   - Critique structures of power on/of platforms, such as anti-blackness
   and digital colonialism, which inhibit and afford agency
   - Reveal the ramifications of platform capitalism, mediated labor
   relations, and the development and/or subversion of political consciousness
   - Develop posthuman challenges to agency by scrutinizing the impact of
   emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence
   - Trace the political ramifications of digital platforms and agency at
   play: video games, streaming, and/or social media
   - Compare imaginations and practices of algorithmic governance
   - Interrogate datafication as a constraint against or catalyst of
   networked subjectivities

Please send all submissions and inquiries to
digitalplatformsandagency at gmail.com.

Potential authors should submit *a 500-word abstract by June 30, 2023* to
Platforms and Agency co-editors Elaine Venter and Reed Van Schenck to be
considered for publication.

Abstracts will be reviewed by the editors by August 30, 2023. Final
submissions for publication of 5,000–9,000 words expected by March 1, 2024.
All submissions will undergo a double-anonymous peer review process
according to journal policies.

-- 
Reed Van Schenck
Graduate Student, University of Pittsburgh
rvanschenck.github.io