>
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES
>
> CALL FOR PAPERS
>
> 2009 marks the 30th anniversary of the
> publication of Jean-François Lyotard?s The
> Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
> ?[I}t is common knowledge,? he wrote, ?that the
> miniaturization and commercialization of machines
> is already changing the way learning is acquired,
> classified, made available, and exploited? (1984,
> org. 1979: 4). In 2010, ?Connected Understanding?
> will be the theme of the Congress of Social
> Sciences and Humanities in Montreal
> (http://www.congress2010.ca/). The Canadian
> Journal of Media Studies announces a special
> issue on Media, Knowledge and the Network
> University edited by Bob Hanke, York University,
> and David Spencer, University of Western Ontario.
>
> The massification and informationalization of the
> university has transformed not only the content
> of teaching and research but also disciplinary
> processes of knowledge production and the
> technological form of academic life and culture.
> The integration and normalization of ICT's raises
> many questions about the university, academic
> labour, scholarly communication and
> collaboration, and academic technoculture. In
> 1957, Marshall McLuhan invited us to reconsider
> the education process by announcing that, with
> the advent of television, the ?classroom without
> walls? had arrived. A half a century later, we
> are working in the university without walls and
> the ICT ?revolution? is over. In ?Universities,
> wet, hard, and harder,? German media theorist
> Friedrich Kittler reviewed 800 years of
> university-based media history to observe that
> ?universities have finally succeeded in forming
> once again a complete media system.? Yet media
> scholars have rarely chosen to study their own
> universities as media systems. This special issue
> of the CJMS is an invitation to reflexive,
> critical media studies. Established and emerging
> scholars are invited to address continuities and
> transformations in new media and the network
> university and to set the agenda for future study and debate.
>
> Possible questions and areas of research and critical inquiry include:
>
> What is unthought, unrepresented and unquestioned
> in discussions of the public university and the
> ?neoliberal turn,? technologically-mediated
> post-secondary education, and institutional
> initiatives in the virtualization of the educational process?
>
> What is the impact of the cybernation of the
> university? What is happening in information
> technology (IT) infrastructure, planning and
> governance? What IT strategies are pursued by
> specific institutions in different jurisdictions?
> What is the role of IT professionals as
> intermediaries between IT industries,
> intermediating organizations, private-sector
> partners and the university? What is the faculty
> experience of ICTs, and IT ?solutions,? services, and support?
>
> What are the networks of possibility and
> affordances of technology, and what are the
> obstacles and limits? the unintended, unanticipated consequences?
>
> What hybrid methodologies, research techniques
> and software enhance our capacity to map the
> wireless campus and network condition of the university?
>
> What philosophers of technology and politics are
> relevant to sharpening our thinking on the
> question of technology? What scholarly
> perspectives on invention, innovation and the
> process of emergence enable us to break the habit
> of instrumentalist thinking and discard the
> ?tool? metaphor? How can we take technical
> artifacts, from small, portable technology to
> entire campus networks, out of their ?black
> boxes? in order to study them? How does the
> technical substrate matter to our thinking? Our
> reading and writing of ?texts?? Our notions of ?research??
>
> How is the university embedded in the network
> society and cognitive capitalism? What are the
> drivers of IT change in universities? What are
> the consequences of the disjuncture between the
> digital culture and practices outside the
> university and IT (planning,
> procurement/evaluation/implementation, support
> and services) inside universities?
>
> How can we move beyond user-centric approaches to
> Web 2.0 based software applications and learning
> management systems, peer-to-peer networks, and
> small tech in academic settings? In the new
> network culture, how can we grasp the relations
> between what is ?given? and what is unlikely,
> surprising, unexpected and unrealized?
>
> How can we move beyond debates over ?student
> centered? learning and faculty deskilling to new
> models of reskilling and organized research
> networks, technological literacy and technologies
> of the common? How can we articulate scholarly
> ?collaboration? and student ?engagement? with a
> politics of knowledge (commodified knowledge,
> open scholarship and knowledge within the social
> sciences and humanities, popular knowledge,
> indigenous knowledge, etc.) that will strengthen
> the public mission of the university after the
> recession? How can we turn away from the
> ?knowledge economy? and towards knowledge
> cultures? What does the prototype of the Canadian
> Institute for Health Research?s Knowledge Broker
> Model portend for the social sciences and humanities?
>
> We also invite investigations of:
>
> ? computerization, campus networking
> strategies, and ICT-related organizational change
> since the advent of distributed computing, the Internet and the WWW
> ? space, time, speed and rhythm in the network university
> ? the production and operativity of
> networks and archives, scholarly journals and
> portals, web-based learning environments and
> objects, research cyberinfrastructure, critical
> cyberpedagogy, technological literacy,
> copyright/left, intellectual property rights
> ? open access movement, open access
> research, open educational resources, open
> courseware, institutional repositories, ?Do
it Yourself? education or edupunk
> ? tropes of factory, ecology, network, mobility, common
> ? articulations and destabilizations of
> oral/written, actual/virtual, bureaucratic
> records/institutional memory, off-line/on line,
> knowledge creation/information sharing, formal
> learning on campus/informal learning off campus,
> amateur/professional, artist/researcher
> ? ideology of convenience, ethos of
> performativity, the promotional condition,
> immaterial academic labour, general intellect,
> circuits of knowledge and struggle
> ? technological ?progress,??knowledge
> economy,? knowledge ?transfer? or ?mobilization,?
> creativity, innovation, academic freedom, academic capitalism
> ? the coming network university, knowledge
> futures, ecoethical perspectives on the
> university?s inputs and outputs and the discourse of ?sustainability?
>
> Since intellectual innovation may be engendered
> at the intersections of disciplines,
> contributions are welcome from outside of
> Communication and traditions and trajectories of
> media studies outside of Canada. Solo or
> collaborative work that provides a comparative,
> international perspective on the network
> university in different countries is especially welcome.
>
> Submission Guidelines
>
> Authors should submit papers of about 25 pages
> (or 8000 words) in MLA style with abstract and
> keywords electronically to David Spencer, Editor,
> (dspencer /at/ uwo.ca). With the exception of the title
> page, please remove all indications of authorship.
>
> The deadline for papers is February 28, 2010.
> Peer review and notification of acceptance will
> be completed by March 31, 2010. Final manuscripts
> accepted for publication will be due April 30, 2010.
>
> Comments and queries can be sent to Bob Hanke,
> Guest Co-Editor, (bhanke /at/ yorku.ca).
> For more information about the Canadian Journal
> of Media Studies, visit http://cjms.fims.uwo.ca/default.htm
