[ecrea] CFP: Culture Theory and Critique special themed issue on The “Newness” of New Media

*Call for essays: /Culture Theory and Critique/** special themed issue 
on *The "Newness" of New Media
Editors Ilana Gershon, Indiana University ((igershon /at/ indiana.edu) 
<mailto:(igershon /at/ indiana.edu)>) and Joshua A. Bell, NMNH, Smithsonian 
Institution ((bellja /at/ si.edu) <mailto:(bellja /at/ si.edu)>)

Outside of the West, communities have traditionally innovated and 
engaged different forms of media, whether using textiles, dog's teeth, 
valuables or abacus. These myriad forms remain integral to the networks 
of communications and relations. Today the new media technologies of the 
Internet, mobile phones and social networking sites provide another 
venue for innovation and continuity. Within the Western context, 
historians of media have demonstrated how new media sparks exaggerated 
fears that intimate connections will be harmed when a technology is 
introduced. Thus part of the "newness" of new media is an often-repeated 
expectation that new forms of representation will disrupt established 
social organization. In this special issue, we hope to explore how the 
"newness" of new media is experienced outside of Euro-America, ranging 
from how communities have and are responding to the introduction of 
writing to the introduction of mobile phones and social networking 
sites. This has a strong historical component; many of our questions 
arise from the aftermath of colonial encounters. Two themes guide these 
ethnographic explorations: the "newness" of new media for dialogue and 
the "newness" of new media for representation.

The first theme explores the ways new media is understood to change how 
dialogue and dissemination are intertwined. In /Speaking Into the Air/, 
John Durham Peters argues that in the Western context, people 
historically feared new media because every new medium alters a 
precarious balance between /dialogue/ (dyadic conversational 
turn-taking) and /dissemination/ (broadcasting). As new media becomes 
incorporated into daily life, each technology becomes valued 
accordingly. People see each new technology as changing how dialogue or
dissemination take place, which introduce new possibilities and new 
risks to communication. In this issue, authors ask: how are the ways 
people’s historically situated understandings of how dialogue and 
dissemination should be interwoven affecting how people responded to new 
media? How are people's epistemological assumptions and social 
organization shaping how they incorporate particular communicative 
technologies?

The second theme examines how new media become grounds by which 
communities can challenge misrepresentations, and assert their 
identities. If new media enable new forms of collaboration and 
participation, how then have they enabled communities to manage more 
effectively how their representations travel? How has this shifted 
historically from colonial to postcolonial moments? What new forms of 
creative play have emerged in the process, and how have older forms been 
extended? If the materiality of media matters as argued by Webb Keane 
and others, how have these new media forms altered or continued existing 
representational economies? Whose networks are being extended or cut in 
the process? To what extent is new media understood as re-structuring 
previously established forms of exchange and knowledge circulation? How 
have these evolving relationships shifted the ways in which scholarship 
is being, and or should be done?

We welcome essays that address either of these themes. The questions are 
not meant to be proscriptive, however, and we welcome queries about 
possible article content and submissions from graduate students.

Completed essays need to be submitted by June 1, 2012 at which time the 
editors will make initial decisions. The length of final essays are to 
be 5,000-7,000 words including notes and please follow the citation 
style found at 
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1473-5784&linktype=44 
<http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1473-5784&linktype=44>.

Send abstracts and essays to Ilana Gershon ((igershon /at/ indiana.edu) 
<mailto:(igershon /at/ indiana.edu)>), Joshua A. Bell ((bellja /at/ si.edu) 
<mailto:(bellja /at/ si.edu)>) or Jennifer Heusel, editorial assistant 
((ctcjourn /at/ indiana.edu) <mailto:(ctcjourn /at/ indiana.edu)>).

*/Culture, Theory and Critique/* is a refereed, interdisciplinary 
journal for the transformation and development of critical theories in 
the humanities and social sciences. It aims to critique and reconstruct 
theories by interfacing them with one another and by relocating them in 
new sites and conjunctures. */Culture, Theory and Critique'/* approach 
to theoretical refinement and innovation is one of interaction and 
hybridization via recontextualization and transculturation.