[ecrea] cfp: Summer School on Digital Cultures

Challenging Methods – 1. Lüneburg Summer School for Digital Cultures
20.-26.9.2015, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, Germany

Hosted by Digital Cultures Research Lab and the Institute for Advanced Study
on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation; organized by Florian Sprenger and
Christoph Engemann

The inaugural issue of the Lüneburg Summer School for Digital Cultures
explores the question and challenge of methods in media studies and digital
cultures. Hosted by the Institute for Advanced Study Media Cultures of
Computer Simulation (MECS) and the Digital Cultures Research Lab (DCRL), the
Lüneburg Summer School for Digital Cultures provides advanced training in
the study of media, their theory, aesthetics and history. Focusing on one
special topic annually, it affords a select group of graduate students the
opportunity to work with distinguished international scholars from all
fields of media studies in an intimate and highly focused context and
provides a platform for participants to engage in dialogue with other
doctoral students from around the world working in similar or related
fields.

This year’s topic, Challenging Methods, reacts to the demands for a
discussion of methods that recently have become prevalent in the context of
media studies. Historically and institutionally, this field of research
originated when scholars from a variety of fields started to confront their
disciplines and specifically their methodologies with the questions of media
epistemology. From those investigations of the hitherto overlooked
media-theoretical presumptions and media practices of their original fields,
a discourse emerged that was labeled media studies – “Medienwissenschaften”.

Incorporating heterogeneous approaches ranging from philosophical and
aesthetic via ethnographic and sociological to epistemological and
performative as well as interventionist practices and net criticism, media
studies has not developed an overarching theoretical or methodological frame
and instead privileged object specific approaches.

Nonetheless, it is within this exchange among disciplines, and fostered by
the tasks brought forward by digitalization, that the question of the
relationship between media and methods recently has become a prominent field
of inquiry. This includes demands for a specification of methods in media
studies. Data-driven analysis of large corpora of texts, visuals or sounds
have led to a re-adjustment of the question of empirical, qualitative and
historical research, while at the same time raising methodological
expectations. The stakes of digitalization, themselves important topics of
the field, intervene in the economy of sources, their circulation and
availability, hence in the practices of research and increasingly turn out
to be a challenge of methods for media studies.

It is this situation between new technical possibilities and an
institutional consolidation that frames the Summer School. Despite these
developments, it seems futile to simply project the longstanding
methodological debates of sociology, history, or ethnography onto the
respective fields of media research. In this regard, the stakes of media
studies lie in the assumption that methodological questions always question
the media of methods: those very technologies and epistemological
presumptions that underlie all methods.

This is the point of departure for the Summer School. Instead of taking
account of different methods, we intend to create an open and provocative
space for the reflection of the technical, epistemological, historical, and
perhaps also methodological conditions of methods, either under the reign of
digitalization or regarding a re-formulation of specific presuppositions. As
a forum, the Summer School "Challenging Methods" will investigate the
historical situation of the current demand for methods, the importance of
technological developments, and the subsequent transformations of our own
research, writing, and thinking.

Considering the experience that methodological questions are most thoroughly
addressed in dissertations, the Lüneburg Summer School for Digital Cultures
will bring together a group of around 18 young international scholars with
renowned faculty to investigate the status and challenge of methods in media
studies. Connecting scholars from different fields, it aims to open up
discussions in media studies, while at the same time offering the chance to
investigate the specific mediality of methods in other fields.

The week long Summer School is structured as a series of shared seminars,
keynote lectures and three streams taught in small groups. The first stream
will investigate the promise of digital tools; the second stream will tackle
the dimensions of a politics of methods; and the third stream will confront
methods as cultural techniques:

1.    Tools of Methods – Chaired by Till Heilmann (University of Siegen),
Keynote by David Gugerli (ETH Zürich)

This stream asks how the increased use of digital devices in humanities
research affects methodology. Starting with an introduction to the different
media theoretical conceptions of tools the stream will investigate the
specificity of digital tools and ask if the notion of the tool changes under
digital conditions. In light of this background the group will investigate
the relation between new digital tools like text editors or database systems
and the evocation of new methods as promoted by the digital humanities. How
can such recursive research into the evolving digital research
infrastructures help us to understand our own changing methods and allow us
to shape new types of methodologies, without methodology becoming an end in
itself?


2.    Politics of Methods – Chaired by Hanno Pahl (University of Luzern),
Keynote tba,

Methods play a central role in shaping the knowledge regimes of scientific
disciplines. Studying the often contentious history of their
institutionalization within a field allows an investigation of how the
introduction of methods privileges certain epistemological positions. Via
comparing media studies to two established disciplines – economics and
sociology – this stream will explore the history and presence of the
politics of methods in their institutional and epistemological effects. How
can such comparison not only help to profile the specifics of digital media
studies’ methods, but also provide evocative potential for exchanges between
media theory, social theory and theoretical takes on markets and capitalism?


3.    Cultural Techniques – Chaired by Christina Vagt (Technical University
Berlin), Keynote tba,

The three primary registers of cultural techniques (image, writing, number)
can help to understand the role of materiality and technology within the
sciences and humanities. In this respect, cultural techniques are modern
auxiliary sciences (an assemblage of methods and objects) that can disrupt
or stabilize specific objects or methods within disciplines. The stream will
ask its participants to practice and reflect on their own field of study and
their methodological framework as cultural technicians. It will also
question, how the cultural techniques approach, which so far has gained
particular traction in historical and epistemological research contexts, can
be made fruitful in contexts of ethnographic or interventionist inquiry.


The Lüneburg Summer School on Digital Cultures invites applications from
outstanding doctoral candidates, but also master students at the end of
their exams, throughout the world in media studies and related fields such
as film studies, literary studies, philosophy, art history, architecture,
sociology, politics, the history of science and visual culture.

All application materials should be sent by email to
(florian.sprenger /at/ leuphana.de) and must be received by November 10, 2014.
Applicants who have been admitted will be notified by the end of November.

The working language of the Summer School is English. Applications are
accepted in English or German, should be submitted electronically in PDF
format and include the following:

-    Letter of Intent indicating academic experience, interest in the Summer
School’s annual topic and the selection of one of the three streams (max.
300 words);

-    Curriculum Vitae (max. 2 pages);

-    Abstract of a possible presentation at the Lüneburg Summer School for
Digital Cultures of no more than 2000 words, double spaced, with standard
margins;

-    Contact information (name, institutional address, email) of two
potential references.

Please use the following naming convention for your application files:
Lastname_Letter_of_Intent.pdf
Lastname_Curriculum_Vitae.pdf
Lastname_Abstract.pdf
Lastname_Contact_Info.pdf

Participants will receive a reader with texts and material for the seminars.
There is no participation fee. Accommodation costs will be covered by the
organizers. We have a limited amount of need-based travel funding available.
Please indicate in your application letter if you wish to apply for travel
funding.


For further information on the DCRL and MECS please visit:
http://cdc.leuphana.com/structure/digital-cultures-research-lab/project/rese
arch/
http://mecs.leuphana.de/









________________________

Dr. Florian Sprenger

Digital Cultures Research Lab
Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
Scharnhorststraße 1
21335 Lüneburg

(florian.sprenger /at/ leuphana.de)

http://www.cdc.leuphana.de
http://www.floriansprenger.com
http://www.flickr.com/farbwahl





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