[ecrea] CFP Media Fields Issue 9 – Spaces of Protest

CFP:
Media Fields Journal Issue 9 – Spaces of Protest

Submission
Deadline: July 18, 2014

“Insurrectional
experiences have taught us how unimaginable things can very quickly
enter into the field of possibilities.” In the time that has elapsed
since Jacques Rancière uttered these prescient words in a 2011
interview, their validity has been repeatedly confirmed. From the Arab
Spring to Occupy Wall Street and from Cairo’s Tahrir Square to
Istanbul’s Gezi Park, creative struggles and imaginative demonstrations
have organically emerged from masses of people who had hitherto been
considered passive, apathetic, or without agency. These collective
movements, these sparks of revolutionary
fire,
have done much more than simply demonstrate an underlying discontent.
They have also challenged the basic framework through which we
interpret our surroundings,
making
visible the invisible and possible the impossible.


In
this issue of Media
Fields,
we are exploring practices of protest as they relate to space and
media. How are activists appropriating spaces and reclaiming the commons?
How are they using technology and media, new and old, to intervene in
relations of power and oppression, production and control? How are
these activities challenging our understanding of culture and identity
and reconfiguring our notion of the sensible? Or by contrast, following
Ranajit Guha’s suggestion, how might we reconstitute
insurgent politics by reading hegemony in reverse—uncovering how
protest is officially rendered as ineffectual, criminal or invisible?
How might media scholars locate alternative traditions of political
mobilization? How do revised notions of materialist agencies help us
grasp the complex assemblages mobilized when protests occur that
include media, meaning and actants? What is the continued relevance of
Marxism, psychoanalysis, and film and media theory in light of
contemporary developments? How do we need to rework our theoretical
approaches to accommodate contemporary circumstances and contingencies?


We
welcome paper submissions dealing with all of these issues. Submissions
may address a specific site or practice of protest, or they may take a
broader view, dealing theoretically with the newly emerging
constellations of solidarity and radical geographic/spatial
imaginaries. We also invite submissions that excavate divergent and
alternative emphases and practices as they relate broadly to media and
protest. Consequently we welcome submissions that suggest new
theoretical approaches to these themes as well as ones that reimagine
(or imagine anew) theories of political engagement, change, and
revolution.


Essay
submissions are typically 1500-2500 words. We also invite proposals for
scholarly or critical engagements in atypical formats such as
interviews, art, or photography. We encourage approaches to this topic
from scholars in cinema and media studies, anthropology, architecture,
art and art history, communication, cultural studies, ecology,
geography, literature, musicology, sociology, and other relevant
fields. Email submissions, proposals, and inquiries to Issue Editors
Greg Burris and Alston D’Silva at (submissions /at/ mediafieldsjournal.org).
The deadline for full submissions is July
18, 2014.
For previous issues of the journal, past submissions and submission
guidelines visit www.mediafieldsjournal.org.

Submissions
may look at a variety of topics including:

    *

      Theorizations
      and contextualizations of specific practices of protest.
    *

      Comparative
      approaches between different sites of protest.
    *

      The
      place of Marxist, post-Marxist, and neo-Marxist approaches to
      revolution, change, and protests and their critiques.
    *

      Interventions
      and discursive practices within the public sphere, alternative 
publics
      and counterpublics. Queer and/or feminist theoretical interventions
      into neoliberalism and the Habermasian conception of public sphere.
    *

      The
      status of film and media theory in the aftermath of protests and
      revolution (Occupy, Protests of ‘68).
    *

      Examinations
      of protests and rebellions in relation to contemporary radical 
thought
      including Alain Badiou’s notion of the Event, Jacques
      Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, or Slavoj
      Žižek’s Act.
    *

      Examinations
      of protests and protest movements via system theory, material and
      social assemblages or actor-network theory.
    *

      Anticolonial
      movements and indigenous resistance, past and present, against 
cultural
      hegemony, appropriation and genocide.
    *

      Representations
      of protest in film, television, and new media.
    *

      Examinations
      of the ways in which practices of protest constitute and/or disrupt
      categories of gender, sexuality, or nationality.
    *

      Responses
      to corporate surveillance and dataveillance.
    *

      Discussions
      of hacking, countersurveillance, and culture jamming as well as
      responses to and condition of media blackouts, censorship and other
      government control over media and communication.
    *

      Practices
      of solidarity, coalition-building in and across spaces, 
identities, and
      movements (for instance, BDS). Or conversely examinations of 
practices
      undercutting solidarity, such as appropriation and strikebreaking.
    *

      Media
      access and the digital divide in relation to protests and social
      movements.



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