ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

October 2-5, 2020

Braga, Portugal

Deadline: January 5, 2020

The Re/media.Lab – Laboratory and Incubator of Regional Media is calling for proposals for a panel submission to the 8^th European Communication Conference: ”Communication and Trust: Building Safe, Sustainable and Promising Futures” to be held in Braga, Portugal, October 2-5, 2020. The panel aims to reflect on the Challenges for Local Journalism in Disinformation Times.

Fake news has recently gained prominence as the way media content is presented and consumed on social networks. The pressure of fake news tends to favor audience’s quick and superficial perception, with little incentive for more careful reflection, in which emotion and polarization play an additional role. In local contexts, the existence of offline social networks supported by close social ties may strengthen the occurrence of endogamic contexts that difficult changes and diversity.

Our group is interested in receiving abstracts proposing a theoretical and experimental approach to fake news in local journalism highlighting the following issues:

a) Disinformation and fake news in local and communitarian contexts.

b) The risk that close ties inside local communities induce an endogamic perception of public life, including effects such as like-minded thoughts. polarized bubbles or the closure of the agenda process.

c) The role and perception of local journalists on the issues related to disinformation and fake news at the local e communitarian levels.

d) The role played by perception of the public on the issues related to disinformation and fake news at local and communitarian levels.

e) Presentation, description or suggestion of original local media-literacy strategies as an element of prevention and combat against disinformation in these contexts.

f) Presentation, description or suggestion of ombudsman strategies as an element of preventing disinformation in these contexts.

g) Presentation of new or reformulated theoretical, experimental and methodological approaches to the studies of disinformation processes in local contexts.

To comply with the ECREA guidelines, individual abstracts of 500 words can be submitted. Abstract titles are limited to 30 words. All abstracts must be written in English and up to10 authors can be included. The presenting author must be listed first and only one author can be nominated as the presenting author.

Please send your abstract to João Carlos Correia at the University of Beira Interior (jcorreia@ubi.pt ) and Pedro Jerónimo (pj@ubi.pt ) until January 5. This will enable Re/media.Lab committee to peer review contributions ahead of the ECREA deadline on January 15.

The 2020 conference is organized by the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) and the University of Minho. For more information: www.ecrea2020braga.eu

Information on the Re/media.Lab: www.labcom-ifp.ubi.pt/remedialab/

Special issue of TMG - Journal for Media History 

Deadline: January 15, 2020

Transnational journalism history acknowledges that cultural forms are produced and exchanged across borders. It focuses on the interactions between agents, ideas, innovations, norms and social and cultural practices beyond national boundaries, as well as the way these interactions affect the incorporation and adaption of new ideas, concepts, and practices into national frameworks. By moving back and forth between the national and transnational level, the connective and dialectic nature of these movements is emphasized. It thus treats the nation as only one level or context among a range of others, instead of being the primary frame for analysis.

This special issue aims to critically interrogate and go beyond the national frameworks within which historical developments of journalism are generally studied. Due to its institutional organization and topical focus, journalism historiography has traditionally been confined to national boundaries. This holds true for studies restricted to the development of journalism in one country, like most press histories, as well as studies that take nations as units for comparative research. Differences and, to a lesser extent, similarities in professional practices and news coverage are usually discussed as autonomous developments and ascribed to national peculiarities. The special issue intends to bring together papers that open new venues for research that move beyond this national boundary. We therefore invite articles related to transnational journalism that (particularly, but not exclusively) focus on:

• Theoretical and methodological reflections on transnational journalism
• Transnational journalistic networks
• Journalists or publishers who were influential “transfer agents”
• Transnational impact on journalistic genres
• Adaptation of foreign examples in a national context
• Case studies of transnational reporting
• Case studies that rely on Digital Humanities methods, for example, text mining or network analysis

Practical guidelines

We ask interested researchers to submit an abstract of max. 350 words which clearly outlines a research question, relevance of the topic, a theoretical/historical framework, justification of research material and approach, and main argument.

Please send your proposals to the editors: Frank Harbers (f.harbers@rug.nl) and Marcel Broersma (m.j.broersma@rug.nl).

Deadline: please hand in your abstract no later than 15 January 2020. Authors will be notified of acceptance by the end of January 2020.

Tentative timeline

The authors of the accepted abstracts will be invited to contribute a full article (max. 8000 words, excluding references and bibliography). The deadline for the full papers is approximately 29 May 2020.

TMG - Journal for Media History is an open access peer reviewed academic journal, published in the Netherlands. Its aim is to promote and publish research in media history. It offers a platform for original research and for contributions that reflect theory formation and methods within media history. For more information and author guidelines, see: https://www.tmgonline.nl/

Gorizia (Italy), March 28-31, 2020

Deadline (extended): January 18 , 2020

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

• Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London)
• Barbara Klinger (Indiana University)
• Robert Fischer

Living in the Material World: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Past and Present Media Ecologies

Since the late Sixties, the notion of “media ecology” has become a crucial part of the academic debate. Fostered by Neil Postman’s theories, media ecology has configured itself as a meta-theoretical ground on which the media are considered as technological environments, capable of shaping our senses and perception. Throughout the years, several insights on such topic have been developed, involving the interrelationships between technological networks, information, and communication (Altheide 1995; Nardi and O’Day 1999; Tacchi, Slater & Earn, 2003; Hearn & Foth, 2007); the notion of “media practice” within these networks (Mattoni 2017); the role of culture in their evolution (Gencarelli 2006; Strate 2008; Polski 2013); etc. We could say that new branches stemmed out from the methodological framework proposed by Postman, in which McLuhan’s legacy appears to be fundamental. Some of them stress the role of materiality in the construction of Medienverbund (Kittler, 1986), media environments and media cultures, others focus on the creation of power/knowledge networks (Parikka 2007, 2010, 2011, 2014): in all of them, every medium is considered as a complex system among other complex systems, with which it develops cultural and practical grids.

The entanglement between the concept of media ecology and the notion of network has become massively relevant for the European debate ever since Félix Guattari’s published his Les Trois Écologies (1989), “Postmodern Deadlock and Post-Media Transition” (1986), and “Entering the Post-Media Era” (2009): here, the media “ecologies” (plural!) are the material contexts in which the processes of subjectivity construction take place.

This notion has been further elaborated by media theorists such as Matthew Fuller (2005) and Michael Goddard (2018), who stress the role of media assemblages, dispositives, and networks concerning the dynamics of subjectivity construction.

In our CFP we aim to explore the multi-faceted realm of past and present media ecologies in order to develop a transdisciplinary approach to their epistemological ground, which will be fostered by the five sections of our school (Cinema and Contemporary Arts, The Film and Media Heritage, Media Archaeology, Porn Studies, and Post-Cinema).

Cinema and Contemporary Arts – On the Edge of a New Dark Age-Media Ecology and Art Strategies

In the modernist framework of technological enthusiasm and faith in progress, technology had been seen as one of crucial forces for society to evolve as it never had before. More recently, this utopian view has been flipped in its dystopian twin: since the 1990s, technological determinism has been the flipside of the coin of several conceptions of media ecologies and environments (particularly in reference to Marshall McLuhan’s and Neil Postman’s understanding of the term), moving the attention from the advantages to the consequences of technological progress in modernized societies. In this view, the so-called Age of Information could be seen as a paradoxical counterpart of the Age of Enlightenment as made visible by the Internet. Whereas, for a long time, it has been argued that putting more information in people’s hands would have inherently fostered their understanding of public issues and increased their participation in social life, the current technologically advanced societies have largely proved their incapability to provide a large and spread condition of equality, social justice and common good (Marx, Smith 1994).

In this view, the state of confusion which we live in, the increasing lack of political awareness, the concerns for the climate crisis, and the commercial exploitation of public spaces via the use of digital media, can be seen as some of the constitutive aspects underlying the current “technologically driven authoritarianism”. As recently suggested by James Bridle’s New Dark Age, acknowledging that the more we rely on the media-networked environment, the less we know its deep social and political implications calls for a critically aware response: developing a “systemic literacy” is the first step to go beyond the purely functional understanding of technology and “to understand the many ways in which technology itself hides its own agency – through opaque machines and inscrutable codes as well as physical distance and legal constructs” (Bridle 2018: 8). >From a different standpoint, many theoretical orientations in humanities, visual culture studies and social sciences have investigated affectivity, focusing on the body and collective experience as oppositional tools to the technology-driven neoliberal modes of performativity. In the wake of the interest of feminist and queer theories for body and emotions, they focused on the “formative power” of affect “cast forward by its open-ended in-between-ness (...) integral to a body’s perpetual becoming” (Gregg-Seigworth, 2010).

All of these considerations lead us to put into question how, in the current Information Society, knowledge flow through media and bodies and beyond representation. Instead of being taken for granted, while thinking at automated information as more reliable than our own experience (“automation bias”) and progressively losing our ability to imagine a future, digital networks and platforms must be re-assessed and re-appropriated as tools to “rethink the world”. In this vein, the Cinema and Contemporary Arts section’s call for papers for the XVIII MAGIS Spring School aims at fostering the debate by gathering theoretical and practice-based reflections on how and by which “yardsticks” can we pinpoint new artistic strategies and tactics to reshape our approach to technology and actively redefine our position in the current media environment.

The Cinema and Contemporary Arts section will thus welcome proposals related (but not limited to) the following sub-topics:

–Artists, artworks and art movements concerned with the concept of media-ecology;

–The “new materialist energies” at work within contemporary arts (t.i. how art has critically addressed digital materialism);

–The political ecology of knowledge practices based on body and affectivity (Massoumi, 2002 : 255);

–Feminist and queer strategies at work against the technologies of governmentality; the queer utopian impulse (Muñoz, 2009);

–The strategic and tactical potential of art in de-commodifying time and the moving image;

–The production of urban and domestic space by digital media and how it affects the public sphere;

–Digital colonialism and post-colonialism.

The Film and Media Heritage – Historicizing Platforms: Sources and Streams

Against the background of the increasing success of streaming as an everyday mode of film experience and the new platform economy (Dal Yong Jin, 2015; Marc Steinberg, 2019), the workshop discusses the history of dealing with film sources and materials in the last decades – from 16 and 35 mm copies to VHS, laser disc and DVD/Blu-ray to streaming platforms. The focus is on changes of the supposedly stable entity of "the film" under the influence of shifting technologies and practices. This includes the materiality and appropriation of cinematic sources as well as the revision and making available of these.

These changes are not only worth considering with regard to coming into contact with films (going to the cinema and travelling to retrospectives compared to inserting a disc and going/staying online), but also to writing about/during films (vague memories from notes written in the dark compared to an analysis frame by frame and to the current applications and algorithms for indexing, annotations, etc.) and for a resulting canon formation. The development from film stock and copies to streaming platforms leads from the establishment of film as a moving image in public spaces and the artefacts of home cinema to – again – moving images (and sounds), which as computer-based streams are no longer bound to fixed screening locations. Hence, the changing mode of “film viewing outside of theatrical precincts” (Barbara Klinger, 2006) changes both: the mode of film experience and the source that makes this experience possible.

Media Archaeology – Ecologies of Perception

Drawing on a media-ecological perspective, the focus of the 2020 edition of the Media Archaeology section will be on “ecologies of perception.” What Luciana Parisi ten years ago described as “technoecologies of sensation,” (2009) today has developed into a new form of rationality, one which is not only concerned with current environmentalist challenges, but that also opens up possibilities for reconsidering processes of “technocapitalist naturalization” (Massumi 2017). Ecology, from this point of view, signifies the need to rethink “the capacities of an environment, defined in terms of a multiplicity of interlayered milieus and localities, to become generative of emergent forms and patterns” (Parisi 2017). Today’s “general ecology,” Erich Hörl writes, “characterises being and thought under the technological condition of a cybernetic state of nature” (2017). Our section picks up on the suggestion that this expanding paradigm calls for new descriptions, including a rigorous historization of sense-perception and sensation, as well as a reflection on their ethical and aesthetical implications. In a time when media increasingly operate at a micro-temporal scale “without any necessary – let alone any direct – connection to human sense perception and conscious awareness” (Hansen 2015), it opens up a horizon for asking “how to re-think or even reinvent media as a form of earth re-writing” (Starosielski/Walker 2016).

Our aim is to bring together papers on the following three, interrelated, topics:

First, the relation between media and communication technologies and social movements. “The media ecological framework is particularly suited for the study of the social movements/media nexus,” Treré-Mattoni (2015) has observed, “because of its ability to provide fine-tuned explorations of the multiplicity, the interconnections, the dynamic evolution of old and new media forms for social change.” From within this framework, we are keen to hear on investigations of various forms, or dispositifs, of subjectivation in the face of newly emerging social forces or social resistance.

Second, the role of media infrastructures in shaping our ways of perceiving the world. Today, we are increasingly thinking and living under conditions of an effective “programmability of planet earth.” (Gabrys 2016). We thus need to pay attention to the complex consequences of media becoming environmental and environments becoming mediated. From this point of view, action and resistance, as well as dynamic relations between human and non-human entities, need to be framed and shaped on a wider range of scale. Joanna Zylinska, in this context, for example, reclaims a “minimal ethics” for the Anthropocene: “swap the telescope for the microscope,” she writes. “It is a practical and conceptual device that allows us to climb up and down various spatiotemporal dimensions” (2014). We ask: what would a minimal ethics for an ecology of perception entail?

Third, the complex linkages between media as technology and environmental issues in more-than-human worlds, including “the concrete connections that media as technology has to resources […] and nature” (Parikka 2013; 2016). Special focus will be dedicated to the capitalist “production of the obsolete” (Jucan 2016); “finite media” (Cubitt 2017); the effects or remains of what Parikka called the “anthrobscene”; and the question what a speculative ethics of “slow (media) violence” (Parikka) and “matters of care” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) might entail.

The Media Archaeology section welcomes proposals relating (but not limited) to the following sub-topics:

–Ecologies of perception;

–Media archaeological approaches to the concept of media ecology, its materiality and infrastructures;

–The role of media affordances in building a media ecology;

–The role of computational design;

–Critical considerations of (un)sustainable media;

–Obsolescence, and/or the reconstruction of the materiality of past media ecologies;

–The complex relations between media technologies, natural environments, and the multifaceted temporalities they entail;

–The role of dynamic instrumentalisation of nature in biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology etc.;

–The nexus between media ecologies and social movements: interactions in a liquid production and fruition context;

–Tele-technologies for contemporary social movements (e.g. memes, meme-platforms, meme-generator, flashmobs, Anonymous operations etc.);

–Dispositifs of subjectivation;

–Speculative ethics, and matters of care;

–The “minimal ethics” for “more-than-human worlds”;

–The notion of “slow media violence” and “matters of care”;

–Geologic matter and bio-matter, deep times and deep places of media in mines and rare earth minerals.

Postcinema – Vulnerable Media

The Postcinema Section invites contributions on the topic of Vulnerable Media. This conceptual framework wants to explore how current and emergent media technologies, distribution platforms, formats or artefacts negotiate affects between users and digital interactive interfaces, in particular, how such media hide or show, contain or generate forms of vulnerability.

An expanding infrastructure serves to manage our emotional experience by tracking, quantifying and supervising, or by shaping that experience through its interfaces, as we connect and share in affective spaces of social media. These media which maintain and nurture our “mediated intimacies” (Attwood, Hakim, Winch 2017) are at the same time vulnerable to engendering processes of physical and emotional disconnect. Arguably, these media formats and objects shape contemporary “structures of feeling” (Williams 1961) and relational emotions (Ahmed 2004) and help regulate affect in capitalist societies (Illouz 2007).

Such affective technologies extend beyond individual self-improvement, leading to intimacy as a governing concept in the relation between state and citizens. Vulnerable media here point to security gaps, hacks, and technologies that enable surveillance and manipulation through governments and companies such as Cambridge Analytica on a global scale, as well as socio-cultural issues, such as exploitation in e-sports or gamergate, comicgate etc.

From global tracking and surveillance, data collection scandals to powerful and proprietary algorithms, quasi-monopolist blackboxed platforms, progress on AI and machine learning systems, as well as data collection lead to subjective feelings of vulnerability. These developments have also renewed discourses on what it means to be human: where does the ‘meatsuit’ end can consciousness be programmed?

In the realm of emergent media the future is tied to issues of instability, change and obsolescence. The race for novelty and technological innovation always entails an unending trajectory towards obsolescence. The speed of change in these practices reflects their inner fear of being “left behind”, paradoxically condemning emerging technologies to a permanent state of ephemerality. Such vulnerability is embodied, for example, by the so-called “impossible archives” (Fanfic archives & the Wayback Machine) which challenge normative understandings of memory and historicity, presenting us with issues of unstable preservation in light of “update or die” logic, “glitches”, “bugs” and “dying” media formats.

The Post-cinema section welcomes proposals on the following topics:

–Who is being made vulnerable:vloggers or creators (Lange 2007); YouTube or TikTok stars, users/viewers (Bridle 2017);

–Where and how is vulnerability manifested or hidden: in industrial features and vulnerable affordances; TikTok and surveillance (Allana 2019); vulnerable aesthetics; video games as “structures of feeling” (Anable 2018);

–The vulnerability of ‘failing’: YouTube-videos with zero views; video games as “the art of failure” (Juul 2013); old and forgotten media; creators managing channels with just a handful of views;

–The politics and ethics of “vulnerability:” cultural discourses and philosophical questions emerging from affect in new/digital: social networking service (SNS) between macrosocial control and microphysical rewriting of the self (Stella 2009); social media affect and democracy; covert media recordings, privacy and consent;

–The affect of vulnerable media: vulnerable ways of seeing, representation and self-representation; the digitization of bodies (see Brodesco and Giordano 2018); cybertypes and inequalities in the digital realm; digital divides; gamergate, comicgate;

–The vulnerability of digital technologies and ecology: media dependence on natural resources; vulnerable humanity and vulnerable earth (Cubitt 2017; Zylinska & Kember 2012); waste and preservation management of data;

–Thevulnerable materiality of digital media:data storage and data centers; data infrastructure and exchange;digital carbon footprint energy.

Porn Studies – Pornographic subjectivities: Sexuality, Race, Class, Age, Dis/Ability

The 2020 edition of the Porn Studies section of the MAGIS – International Film Studies Spring School aims to investigate pornography as a dispositive of subjectivation (Foucault 2001), that is as a complex and heterogeneous assemblage of technologies, institutions, discourses, practices, ideologies (Agamben 2009) able to create subjectivity through «a mixed economy of power and knowledge» (Rabinow and Rose 2003). The main goal of the section is therefore to understand what kind of subjects are produced by pornography and how they are constructed, with particular attention to the intersections between sexuality and race, class, age, dis/ability.

Drawing loosely on Jacques Derrida’s philosophical reflections, we could say that pornography-as-dispositive is informed by a carno-phallogocentric logic, that is by «the scheme that governs the production of the subject in Western culture» (1992). According to Derrida, this subject is produced by means of a process of exclusion (of other subjects) and through the construction of a structural Otherness.

Pornography has always established complex and contradictory relations with this scheme. On the one hand, pornography (or, a specific kind of pornography) seems to reiterate (and reinforce) the logic of carno-phallogocentrism, in that it seems to create the quintessential «sovereign subject»: white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, young, and (upper) middle-class. On the other, pornography (or, another kind of pornography) seems to undermine the carno-phallogocentric scheme from the inside, deconstructing some of the central nodes on which it is based, building instead heterotopic spaces in which subjects seem to develop new and decentralized subject positions.

With this in mind, we invite proposals that explore, but are not restricted to, the following topics:

–Pornographic representations of race, class, age, dis/ability, present and past;

–Pornographic stereotypes about race, class, age, dis/ability and their «changing historical contexts» (Rosello 1998);

–«Marked bodies» (Holmes 2012) in pornography;

–Re-appropriation of representation by decentralized subjects;

–«Oppositional modes of production and perverse viewerships» beyond «the framework of visibility politics organized about the nexus of positive-negative images» (Nguyen 2014);

–Essentialist vs. constructivist readings of race, class, age, dis/ability and naturalization vs. denaturalization of difference in pornography;

–Fetishization of race, class, age, dis/ability in pornographic production;

–Industrial niches (such as, for instance, interracial, “chav porn”, granny porn, disability porn, etc.) and commodification of race, class, age, dis/ability within long-tail economy (Anderson 2004);

–Stars and performers, present and past (for example, Jeannie Pepper, Lexington Steele, Nina Hartley, Long Jeanne Silver, Brandon Lee, Asa Akira, etc.)

–Specialized films, film series, websites, platforms channels and categories on porn aggregators based on race, class, age, dis/ability.

We invite you to send us proposals for papers or panels. The deadline for their submission is January 18 , 2020.

Every proposal _must be_ addressed to a specific section of the Spring School.

Proposals should not exceed one page in length. Please make sure to attach a short CV (10 linesmax). A registration fee (€ 150) will be applied. For more information, please contact us at goriziafilmforum@gmail.com .

University of St. Andrews, School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies

Salary: £33,797 - £40,322 per annum, pro rata

Start Date: 1 August 2020 or as soon as possible thereafter

Fixed Term for 11 months (until 1 July 2021)

The Department of Film Studies seeks to appoint an Associate Lecturer for a 11-month period from 1 August 2020 to 1 July 2021. The role will involve convening and teaching a range of modules at the undergraduate and masters levels. Candidates should also be prepared to take on some administration duties and provide initiative and student for undergraduate activities such as screening series and careers events.

The successful candidate will show evidence of outstanding teaching in several areas of the discipline, ability and exp erience in the performance of administrative tasks, and the flexibility and range to be able to support the Department in its various teaching activities.

We would particularly welcome applications from candidates who display innovation in teaching practice, with the proven ability to teach across the spectrum of film studies subjects with awareness of the intersections of other media and screen cultures.

To make informal enquiries about this position, please contact Head of Department, Dr. Leshu Torchin (lt40@st-andrews.ac.uk) or Dr Lucy Donaldson, Director of Teaching (lfd2@st-andrews.ac.uk).

The University is committed to equality for all, demonstrated through our working on diversity awards (ECU Athena SWAN/Race Charters; Carer Positive; LGBT Charter; and Stonewall). More details can be found at http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/hr/edi/diversityawards/.

Closing Date: 3 January 2020 Please quote ref: AOAC1086RXHM

Further Particulars: AOAC1086RXHM FPs.doc

School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies

Salary: £33,797 - £40,322 per annum, pro rata

Start Date: 1 August 2020 or as soon as possible thereafter

Fixed Term for 11 months (until 1 July 2021)

University of St. Andrews, School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies

Salary: £41,526 - £51,034 per annum

Start Date: 1 August 2020 or as soon as possible thereafter

We are seeking to appoint a Lecturer in Film Studies to join our department and contribute to a vibrant environment of research, teaching, and public engagement at the University of St Andrews. The successful candidate should demonstrate: evidence of outstanding research that complements departmental strengths; a commitment to excellence in teaching; the ability to take on significant administrative roles; and the initiative, innovation, and range to support the department in public engagement and student activities.

This role involves producing excellent research, convening and teaching a range of modules at the undergraduate and masters levels, supervising both undergraduate and postgraduate students, and contributing to the administration of teaching, research, and public engagement in the department.

To make informal enquiries about this position, please contact Head of Department, Dr. Leshu Torchin (lt40@st-andrews.ac.uk) or Dr Tom Rice, Senior Lecturer (twtr@st-andrews.ac.uk).

The University is committed to equality for all, demonstrated through our working on diversity awards (ECU Athena SWAN/Race Charters; Carer Positive; LGBT Charter; and Stonewall). More details can be found at http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/hr/edi/diversityawards/.

Closing Date: 3 January 2020

Please quote ref: AC1093HM

Further Particulars: AC1093HM FPs.doc

School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies

Salary: £41,526 - £51,034 per annum

Start Date: 1 August 2020 or as soon as possible thereafter

Closing Date: 3 January 2020

Proposal deadline (extended): February 1, 2020

Co-editors:

• Jessica M. F. Hughes, Assistant Professor, Millersville University, jessica.hughes@millersville.edu
• Mariaelena Bartesaghi, Associate Professor, University of South Florida, mbartesaghi@usf.edu

This is a call for an edited volume on Disability in Dialogue. We invite chapter proposals (1500-200 words) that employ discourse studies methodologies to analyze disabled dialogues and dialogues about disability for a volume of interest to dialogue, communication, disability and discourse scholars.

Everyday dialogues are consequential. Spoken, written and digital discourse in conversations, public hearings, assessment measures, social media sites, organizational manuals, and institutional policies defines disabilities, grants certain bodyminds access, and excludes others. It is through dialogue as embodied inter-action that disability dis/appears and that disabled identities are constituted and that we experience ableism and manage impairment. Disability is also a way of knowing. Disabled dialogues realize our understanding of dis/ability and communication.

As with ‘disability,’ there are many discourses of ‘dialogue.’ For us, ‘dialogue’ calls attention to interaction (whether face-to-face, digital, or temporally distant), asymmetries (of knowledge, status, access), dilemmas, tensions, problems, voices, and affective experience. Analyzing disability in dialogue is a method for theorizing these and other dimensions of discourse to account for disabled ways of knowing, thinking, perceiving, and being in the world.

This collection was first conceived in light of the following questions. How might we center disabled perspectives to theorize dialogue? What sorts of ways of communicating does disability afford? How does disability shape dialogue and vice versa? What does it mean to identify as disabled, to claim an experience in terms of disability, to belong within a discourse, to access a diagnosis? How does the dis/appearance of disability rearrange the past, present, and future and redefine relationships and experiences? What kinds of moral accounts accompany disability in dialogue? What might be the power of dis/ability and what sort of power is it? How is ableism constituted in dialogue? What kinds of dialogic moments have the most potential to dismantle ableism and make the world a more inclusive place for all bodyminds?

We invite chapters that raise these and other questions about disability in dialogue. Chapters should start by defining dialogue and then offer empirical analyses that pay close attention to spoken, written, and/or other semiotic forms that constitute dialogue, in order to guide us in an examination of the consequentiality of disabled dialogues and discourse about disability.

Submission proposals are due February 1, 2020 and should include

• Name(s), affiliation and contact information of author(s)
• A 150 word bio
• Chapter title
• A 1500- 2000 word description of your proposed chapter plus references

Notices of acceptance will be sent by March 31, 2020. Full chapters are due October 1, 2020.

April 29-30, 2020

McGill University, Montreal

Deadline: January 10, 2020

Organized by

• Jhessica Reia, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University
• Will Straw, James McGill Professor of Urban Media Studies, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University

Over the last decade, the study of the night has emerged as an international, interdisciplinary field of scholarly research. Historians, archaeologists, geographers, urbanists, economists and scholars of culture and literature have analyzed the night time of communities large and small, across a wide range of historical periods. The study of the night has expanded in tandem with new attention to the night on the part of city administrations, organizers of cultural events (like nuits blanches and museum nights) and activists fighting gentrification, systems of control and practices of harassment and exclusion which limit the “right to the night” of various populations.

In this context of this new attention to the night, we invite proposals for an international conference, in English and French, on relationships between media and the night. We are open to papers focussing on old and new media, from any disciplinary perspective, and dealing with any historical period or geographical area. Possible topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

- The place of media consumption and circulation within the 24-hour cycle;

- Formal and stylistic features of media treatments of the night;

- Media constructions of the transgressive, marginal or identitarian night;

- Specialized media directed at (or produced by) communities of the night;

- The role of media forms (or platforms) in tracing itineraries of night-time activity;

- Media tools to enhance the safety and accessibility of the night;

- “Intermedial” dimensions of media’s relationship to the night (e.g., electric lighting and photography; late-night television and classic cinema, etc.);

- The challenge of imagining “night” genres for 24-hour streaming services;

- Archiving the night;

- Pre-digital or digital practices of mapping the night;

- Night, social media and data visualization;

- Games, apps and night modes;

- Night media and energy infrastructures.

Proposals (with title) should be approximately 350 words, in French or English, and submitted by email to jhessica.reia@mcgill.ca by January 10, 2020. Please note that, while the organizers are unable to cover the travel and accommodation costs of participants, we will and will not charge a registration fee.

https://theurbannight.com/

University of Minho (Portugal)

International selection tender is open until 9th January 2019

http://www.cecs.uminho.pt/en/concurso-para-investigador-doutorado/

Project: AUDIRE – Audio Repository: saving sonic based memories (www.audire.pt)

Place of work: Communication and Society Research Centre – University of Minho (Portugal)

AUDIRE is a research project funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. It aims to create social awareness on the relevance of sound as a form of expression and to explore the innovative and creative potential of sound narratives. The working plan is organised into five main objectives:

a) to develop a theory of sound as an essential support for human expression and as a source of knowledge;

b) to understand how people recognise and value the acoustic environments;

c) to construct a repository of open access sound contents;

d) to create a virtual sound museum which can contribute to stimulate the creativity of emerging artists and at the same time preserve a kind of sound heritage, and

e) to promote sound literacy based on a proposal of pedagogical activities.

The research team is now recruiting a new researcher.

Candidates should fit the following main requirements:

1) to hold PhD in Communication Sciences;

2) to be proficient in Portuguese and English;

3) to present a portfolio of relevant works of technique and/or artistic production in the sound effect area.

More details available here: http://www.cecs.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/CTTI_144_19_ICS-IN.pdf

Special Issue of Culture Machine

Deadline: March 1, 2020

Edited by Peter Jakobsson, Anne Kaun & Fredrik Stiernstedt

We are seeking contributions for a special issue of Culture Machine – an international open-access journal of culture and theory – exploring Machine Intelligences in Context.

Culture Machine is a series of experiments in culture and theory. Its aim is to seek out and promote scholarly work that engages provocatively with contemporary technical objects, processes and imaginaries from the North and South. Building on its open ended, non-instrumental, and exploratory approach to critical theory, Culture Machine calls for creative scholarship and research that contests globalizing technical narratives and their environmental logics of extraction.

This special issue is a long overdue confrontation with the hype surrounding artificial intelligence. The supposed blessings that AI will bestow upon datafied societies, as well as the associated dangers, are now well-known both to the academic specialist and to the general public. Representatives from the tech sector and the world of politics claim that the fourth industrial revolution will be powered by AI and that AI will eventually become ubiquitous within politics, industry, culture and in everyday life. The impulse behind this special issue is to interrogate these prophesies a bit closer and to get a look behind the shiny surfaces of these new, often unseen technologies. Because it does seem that what AI actually promises, and most of all, what it actually delivers, is neither found in the realm of the fantastic nor the uncanny, and a lot of it is not even particularly new, intelligent or artificial.

The task of this special issue is thus to provide a counter-narrative to the dominant accounts of AI. It is not a matter of debunking AI, of unmasking the ideological interests behind it or revealing its dirty algorithmic secrets, but of putting AI in its critical contexts beyond the technological sublime – ie. the myths surrounding current technological developments that are meant to inspire both awe and fantasies of control and mastery. By combining phenomena that do not normally go together, such as AI and intersectionality, this special issue seeks to un-familiarize the familiar and to make unexpected connections, while also exploring potential critical and more just futures. One question that seems particularly pertinent to ask is of the relations, substitutions and combinations of different forms of intelligence, both human and more than human, and to explore how these come together in different contexts. Contributions that employ critical perspectives from either the social sciences or the humanities are welcome, but we also invite and encourage experimental and transdisciplinary approaches, including contributions from the information sciences, software studies, and articles focused on case studies of AI with stakes for Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

It is time to move past an understanding of AI that borders towards viewing it as a technological sublime. In order to do so we should analyse it as a broad phenomenon that questions the integration of machinic forms of intelligence in lived settings, particularly across the relations it is generating in the Global South.

We welcome proposals that address, build upon and expand the following topics:

• Critical interrogations of definitions and conceptualizations of intelligence(s)
• Pluralities of machine intelligences
• Sensory capacities and AI
• The biopolitics and geopolitics of AI
• Sex, gender and AI
• Race and AI
• Critical interrogations of AI narratives
• Critical perspectives on AI sited in the Global South
• Progressive regulation of AI

Please submit a 500-word abstract and 2 page CV to peter.jakobsson@sh.se by 1 March 2020

Timeline:

• Submission of abstracts: 1 March 2020
• Notification of acceptance: 20 March 2020
• Submission of full papers: 1 September 2020
• Peer Review: 15 November 2020
• Revision: 15 December 2020
• Publication: January 2021

Fordham University

The Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University welcomes applicants to fill an opening for an assistant professor position in the Communications and Media Management Area starting in the Fall 2020 Semester.

ABOUT THE POSITION:

We are looking for faculty with strong research and teaching potential in all areas of media management, with possible research specializations in any of the following areas (this list is not exhaustive, and we are open to other areas of research as well: digital media, media economics, media strategies, media product development, social media, audience behavior and metrics - as we have immediate teaching needs in these areas.

Other areas may also include communication in international and organizational contexts.

The ideal candidate will possess a Ph.D., but ABD candidates will also be considered. All candidates should be dedicated to excellence in teaching and research.

We seek candidates who can teach undergraduate and graduate courses in one or more of the following: digital media, business of new media, and media strategy. Ability and expertise to teach courses in business communication and leadership communication is a definite plus.

ABOUT THE AREA:

Communications and Media Management Area includes scholars with experience and interest in the business of communication industries as well communication practices in business. We administer undergraduate majors and concentrations related to our field (Communications and Media Management, Digital Media and Technology) and we participate in interdisciplinary programs across campuses. We also offer MS in Media Management, and contribute to MS in Strategic Marketing Communications (online) as well as offer specialized classes to our MBA programs in the areas of media management and organizational communication. Our programs have a strong focus on international business.

The Gabelli School of Business offers courses on two campuses, one at Lincoln Center in Manhattan and one in the Fordham section of the Bronx. Faculty will teach at our Rose Hill Campus located in the Bronx where our undergraduate program is based, and our Lincoln Center Campus in Manhattan which features our graduate program and recently launched undergraduate Digital Media and Technology program. Faculty can be assigned to either campus, or both.

Fordham University is an independent, Catholic university in the Jesuit tradition and welcomes applications from men and women of all backgrounds. Fordham is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Women, people of color, and people with disabilities are encouraged to apply. Consistent with our Jesuit tradition, we believe that cultural and intellectual diversity is central to the excellence of our academic program and strive to create an academic community and campus culture that attracts and facilitates the development of teacher-scholars. We are especially interested in candidates with substantive experience and commitment to teaching and mentoring students from a range of social, cultural, and economic backgrounds. Having a diverse and inclusive community is a key part of Fordham's Strategic Plan and emphasized in University President Fr. McShane's November 2016 Response to the Diversity Task Force.

Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business is accredited by the AACSB. Hiring is subject to final budgetary approval.

REQUIREMENTS:

Applications should include:

• a cover letter outlining your areas of research and teaching philosophy
• a curriculum vitae
• names and contact information for at least three references
• a sample of scholarly work
• evidence of teaching effectiveness.

For questions about this position, please contact the Area Chair, Bozena Mierzejewska at bmierzejewska@fordham.edu.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. We encourage early submission as decisions will be made once suitable candidates have been identified. We will no longer view applications after January 31, 2020.

To apply, applicants should go to https://apply.interfolio.com/72576, click "Apply Now", enter your name, email, and create a password, at which point you will be immediately dropped in the application.