current calls for papers
Issue 23: The Internet as Politicizing Instrument.
Abstracts (500 words) due 1 May 2012
Issue 22: Hyperaesthetic Culture.
- Submissions CLOSED.
Issue 21: Rethinking the Seasons: New Approaches to Nature.
- Submissions CLOSED.
CFP: Issue 23
The Internet as Politicising Instrument
Transformations is calling for submissions for Issue 23: The Internet as Politicising Instrument.
For this issue of Transformations, we invite papers that consider the gamut of change that the Internet has provoked, drawing on Marcus Breen's Uprising: the Internet's Unintended Consequences (Common Ground Publishing, Champaign, IL, 2011).
In Uprising Marcus Breen employs Walter Benjamin's arguments about art as a 'politicising instrument ... to allow for the proletariat to speak for themselves' (p. 30). Following this assertion, we would like to invite contributors to submit papers that reflect on this claim, to support, challenge or deeply interrogate it. Discussions could include analysis of the ways the Internet enables the 'proletariat' and the abject to speak for themselves (following Julia Kristeva, Neil Larsen, Judith Butler, Arthur Kroker and others). The creation of new styles of false consciousness is open for discussion. Does the Internet require a new kind of speaking, one which does not fit older forms of class discourse? And what role does art, if any, play in this speaking? Can the Internet be understood as a new media tool offering emancipation given the political economy of the media in general? Are there lessons to be learned about proletarian political mobilisation due to the Internet after the so-called Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street? Discussion about the meaning of 'proletarianisation' in the Internet era could take up the interpretive work Breen offers on the new definition of the term in an era when cultural 'stuff' is largely unregulated in a neo-liberal context.
Shifts in the circulation and availability of otherwise regulated media differ from nation to nation and geographical region to region, suggesting that proletarianisation due to the Internet takes a multiplicity of forms. The implications for political mobilisation may offer unprecedented opportunities for political action across the spectrum. Questions about the challenges to the order of liberal democracy abound and are welcome from either theoretical or empirical case study perspectives or in innovative multidisciplinary modalities.
Abstracts (500 words): due 1st May 2012, with a view to submit articles by 1st September.
Abstracts should be sent to:
The General Editor, Warwick Mules, at w.mules@bigpond.com
For submission guidelines and to view Transformations online go to:
http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/
CFP: Issue 22
Hyperaesthetic Culture
EXTENDED DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: 7 DECEMBER 2011
Transformations is calling for submissions for Issue 22: Hyperaesthetic Culture.
We live in a competitive sensory environment. The marketing of consumer goods continually appeals to taste, touch, vision, hearing, and smell, compelling other practices to engage our senses in what David Howes describes as a 'hyperaesthetic culture'. This environment is saturated with alluring and intense sense experience that proliferates as technologies such as ultrasonography, satellites and computer applications provide access to things previously beyond human perception. Bodies are cultivated to be aesthetically appealing and optimally available to the senses for commercial, medical and security purposes.
This special issue of Transformations will examine sensory regimes and the way in which people respond to them. Recent cultural research into the senses shows that the relationships and hierarchies between them are not static. Varying sensoriums are involved in different understandings of the self and its relationship to the world. This is apparent in cultural studies projects that implicitly and explicitly integrate questions of sensory experience into their investigations.
We invite submissions in the areas of philosophy, critical, cultural and media studies, and creative arts research. Possible topics include:
| – | new technologies of the senses, such as haptic technologies | |
| – | the effects of sensory regimes on bodies and minds | |
| – | sensory appeal and the persistence of technologically 'outmoded' goods, such as vinyl records | |
| – | relationships between hyperaestheticism and thought | |
| – | sensory adaptation and substitution, such as human echolocation | |
| – | ways of making bodies and objects available to the senses, such as body scans | |
| – | senses other than the traditional five senses, such as proprioception | |
| – |
new media arts projects incorporating biometric feedback |
New deadline for abstracts (500 words): due 7 December 2011 with a view to submit by 7 March 2012.
Abstracts to be forwarded to:
Erika Kerruish erika.kerruish@scu.edu.au
For submission guidelines go to: http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/
CFP: Issue 21
Rethinking the Seasons: New Approaches to Nature
Cultural Studies is not very good at thinking about the place of nature in today's technologically mediated life as it's mainly concerned with “constructivism” or the production of cultural objects, identities and affects. Nature always comes to foil such things, exceeding them, breaking them down, returning them to the earth. The problem is how to “think” nature in this context. And how does this thinking of nature help us to relate to the sciences, with their particular way of thinking of nature as objectified, managed environment.
A number of recent cases in point stand out. One is “climate change” as it problematises a hard and fast distinction between nature and culture. It also upsets an orderly progression and change of the seasons. The seasons are a cultural construction of nature, and the four European seasons imposed in the case of Australia on Aboriginal seasons (often 6) are a colonisation of time. Similarly politicians and journalists referring to recent disasters as natural and as exhibiting the wrath of &lquo;Mother Nature” is problematic both for their Janus-faced construction of nature and for not acknowledging and appreciating “her” bounty and generosity.
This special issue of Transformations co-edited by Rod Giblett and Warwick Mules invites submissions from those interested in contributing to the discussion of the cultural construction of nature around the issues of climate change, seasonality, disaster, and so forth, as well as broader theoretical and philosophical issues concerned with the rethinking of nature as a category of Western thought.
Abstracts (500 words) due 17 June 2011 with a view to submit articles by 16 September 2011.
Abstracts to be forwarded to:
Rod Giblett r.giblett@ecu.edu.au
or
Warwick Mules at w.mules@uq.edu.au