[ecrea] CFP: Cunning Knowledge and Media Technologies

Call for Papers: Cunning Knowledge and Media Technologies/
/

/Platform: Journal of Media and Communication/

http://platformjmc.com <http://platformjmc.com/>

An interdisciplinary journal for early career researchers and graduate
students

Volume editor: Christopher O’Neill

Abstract submissions due: *5^th  of March, 2016*

Full paper submissions due: *20^th  of May, 2016*

Everyone is on the side of the cunning. Media, communications, and
cultural studies scholars have increasingly come to identify resistance
with the alacrity of Michel de Certeau’s walker, with the trickster
whose clever ‘tactics’ always outwit the lumbering stupidities of state
power and its ‘strategies’. Cunning knowledge comes from below, it is
popular, it resists codification and iteration, it responds to a given
exigency /in the moment/, it is defined by a certain /disposition/.
Cunning belongs to those who, in a state of lack, are driven to subvert
majoritarian institutions and ways of thinking. Theorists including
Michel de Certeau, Guy Debord, Sarah Kofman, Carlo Ginzburg, Donna
Haraway, Marcel Detienne, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Gilbert Simondon, and
François Jullien have celebrated the capacity for cunning to undermine
instrumental or otherwise reductive conceptions of knowledge.

But what happens when even the largest organs of state and corporate
power self-consciously seek to recuperate the power of the cunning for
their own ends? In Hesiod we read that Zeus swallowed the Greek goddess
of cunning Metis, for “fear that she might bring forth a thunderbolt
stronger than his own”. Analogously, Google has produced “a kind of
cunning world-wide-web-weaving”, Dan Mellamphy has argued in a previous
issue of /Platform/, it has “swallowed-up the ruse and intelligence of
the internet” by crafting a powerful, emergent, yet unstable archive, a
bottom-up form of administrative knowledge. Furthermore, the distinction
Certeau makes between the prescriptive spatial grammar of urban
strategists, and the colloquial /détournements/ made by walkers, seems
less secure today, as pattern-of-life spatial analytics attempt to grasp
the movement of the city /in motion/, with all its associated rhythms
and cadences.

This issue of /Platform/ seeks papers which engage with the question:
What does ‘cunning’ signify today in the technological realm? Does
cunning still belong to those who lack power, or are the powerful today
now so powerful that they lack not even lack? As the qualities
associated with cunning, such as adaptation, induction, speed, and
resilience become adopted as normative values in finance and statecraft,
does cunning still possess the capacity to disrupt (disruption itself
perhaps now holding dubious critical efficacy), or is there a need to
consider new modes of critique, ‘new weapons’, perhaps a reappraisal of
the neglected virtues of slowness, deliberation, even stasis?
/Platform/ seeks papers on all aspects related to cunning and media &
technology, including but not limited to:

-Hunting techniques (the venatic) & (state) surveillance, drones, etc.
-The relation between witchcraft, alchemy, sorcery, and modern technoscience
-Cunning as a gendered knowledge
-Cunning as an aspect of neo-liberal subjectivity
-Cunning and lack, aporia, poverty
-Cunning and medical technologies (e.g., health tracking technologies)
-Cunning as an embodied knowledge, its relation to gesture
-The relation between mimesis, trickery, and online self-identity and
self-representation
-The relation between haptic media and cunning techniques of
sleight-of-hand (prestidigitation)
-Cross cultural conceptions of cunning (e.g., comparing /metis/, /zhi/,
etc.)
-The relation between fortune-telling, soothsaying techniques, and
predictive analytics
-Cunning and design/craft
-Cunning and approaches to ‘queering’ normative knowledge practices
-Cunning and its relation to temporality and speed
-The relation between cunning and other forms of knowledge (e.g.,
/phronesis/, /sophia/, etc.)

Please send all enquiries and submissions to (platformjmc /at/ gmail.com)
<mailto:(platformjmc /at/ gmail.com)>. Abstracts must be accompanied by a brief
curriculum vitae and biographical note, and should not exceed 350 words.
Abstracts are to be submitted no later than 5^th  of March, 2016. Full
papers will be due by 20^th  of May 2016; please be aware that
acceptance of abstracts does not guarantee publication. All submissions
should be from early career researchers (defined as being within a few
years of completing their PhD.) or current graduate students undertaking
their Masters, PhD. or international equivalent.

All eligible submissions will be sent for double-blind peer-review.
Early submission is highly encouraged as the review process will
commence on submission.

Note: Please read the submission guidelines before submitting work
<http://platformjmc.com/make-a-submission/guidelines/>. Submissions
received not in house style will not be accepted and authors will be
asked to resubmit their work with the correct formatting before it is
sent for review.

/Platform: Journal of Media and Communication/ is a fully refereed,
open-access online graduate journal. Founded and published by the School
of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne (Australia),
/Platform/ was launched in November 2008.

/Platform/ is refereed by an international board of established and
emerging scholars working across diverse fields in media and
communication studies, and is edited by graduate students at the
University of Melbourne.

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