[ecrea] CfP Digital Intimacies Symposium

*SYMPOSIUM CALL FOR PAPERS*

**

*Digital Intimacies: interrogating the interface between intimate lives 
and calculative digital media platforms*

Convened by Amy Dobson (UQ), Nicholas Carah (UQ), and Brady Robards (UTAS)

University of Queensland (Brisbane), December 12 and 13, 2016

Following last December’s Digital Intimate Publics symposium at UQ we 
are again hosting a small, single-panel, two day symposium that 
continues our efforts to navigate the interplay between intimate lives 
and the logics of digital media.

We are very pleased to announce that Professor Sarah Banet-Weiser (USC 
Annenberg School of Communication) will join us as a keynote speaker. 
Professor Banet-Weiser’s work on feminist theory, popular culture, 
authenticity, ambivalence and brand culture has set out many of the 
questions and issues we aim to explore over these two days.

/Call for papers/

  From ephemeral everyday image play on Snapchat, to hook-up and dating 
apps like Grindr and Tinder, to the exploration of bodies, affects and 
identities on Tumblr, to the depiction of domestic life by Instagram 
influencers, intimate lives are being performed, recorded, analysed and 
commodified through the digital.

Digital media platforms can be understood as engineering projects that 
seek to calibrate and modulate human capacities driven by the commercial 
demands of sponsoring brands. They publicise and promote certain kinds 
of intimacies and bodies. Young, female, and heteronormative bodies are 
more likely to be made visible by the commercially-driven technical 
architecture of digital media. At the same time, these digital spaces 
are also sites where ‘nondominant’ people and bodies flourish as ‘‘a 
porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises 
a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, 
confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an x’ 
(Berlant 2008, p. viii).

In this juxtaposition we encounter the ambivalent nature of intimacy and 
publicity on digital media: a site of promise and a site for the 
emergence of new logics of control. Our intimate and everyday lives are 
lived in relation to the calculative, algorithmic and promotional logic 
of digital media systems. Careful attention to the entanglements between 
lived experience and the media architecture that is a material fact of 
everyday life is critical in an era where the sensory and analytic 
capacities of media are expanding dramatically alongside the living out 
of our intimate lives.

Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) argues that ambivalence is a critically 
important affect in the interplay between ourselves and commercial media 
and brand culture. This ambivalence is in part the product of life lived 
in a media and cultural formation that thrives on the creative, critical 
and affective capacities of users.

With this in mind we are seeking papers that explore the interface 
between the intimate and the calculative:

·How do digital media calibrate and commodify the human capacity to 
affect one another?

·What kinds of calculations do users make about the algorithmic 
brokering of visibility and attention by digital media platforms?

·What possibilities are generated by the ambivalent entanglement between 
users and the digital?

We welcome scholars of digital culture who are engaging with ideas about 
intimacy, publicity, publics, promotional culture, brands and digital media.

Timeline: Abstracts of 300 words due August 31, 2016 with notifications 
of accepted papers sent by September 30.

Please send abstracts to Nicholas Carah at (n.carah /at/ uq.edu.au) 
<mailto:(n.carah /at/ uq.edu.au)>by August 31, 2016.

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