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[ecrea] CfP: Cultural Critique - Re-negotiating authority in contemporary media culture

Wed Mar 29 11:09:20 GMT 2017




  CfP – special issue of MedieKultur:


Cultural Critique - Re-negotiating authority in contemporary media culture

This call invites article proposals on cultural critique in contemporary media culture. Interconnected media institutional and technological developments have during the past two decades enabled advanced public participation in cultural debate, but also challenged intellectual authority, enlightenment and expertise. Today cultural critique stems not only from traditional critical institutions such as academia and the news media, associated with intellectual and public authority. Culture critical authority is constantly performed and (re)negotiated in various types of digital media by bloggers, celebrities, intellectuals, pundits, radio and TV hosts as well as amateur reviewers. Processes of digitalization, commercialization and professionalization in the media industries have thus blurred the boundaries of what is ‘cultural critique’ and who may be labeled ‘a cultural critic’?

At least four interconnected features have challenged the established critical institutions:

1) The media’s favoring of cultural generalists at the expense of specialists with ‘critics’ without an aesthetic knowledge entering the culture critical scene, potentially marginalizing academically grounded, cultural critique and art reviewing

2) Amateurs and their increasing participation in cultural debate from a bottom-up or more subjective and experienced-based perspective by means of digital media platforms, i.e., agents residing outside institutionalized frameworks, performing popular expertise

3) Celebrity culture’s ubiquity in view of visibility, renown and fame increasingly equaling authority and suggesting that fame and authority in one sphere can be translated into influence in other spheres

4) Social media’s blurring of the boundaries between the public and private, challenging conceptions of when and how cultural critics perform as professionals and when they provide more private judgments of taste or statements

These features point to the necessity of more thoroughly investigating the current reconfigurations of cultural critical authority and expertise /in/ (digital) media and /by means of/ (digital) media. Hence, this special issue of /Mediekultur/ aims to address the shifting relations between specialists/generalists, professionals/amateurs, producers/users, public/private in cultural critique; how these shifts put the traditional authority and self-understanding of the cultural critic to the test; and how media visibility, media capital or celebrity capital have become pivotal for gaining a critical voice.

We welcome both theoretically and/or empirically focused contributions that address the following topics and questions (but not exclusively):

  * How can we conceptualize ‘cultural critique’ in contemporary media
    culture?
  * How does the increasing heterogeneity of cultural arbiters of taste
    in contemporary media influence and transform the production, form
    and content of cultural critique?
  * How do digital media (e.g., blogs/vlogs, Twitter, Instagram)
    influence, reproduce, challenge and transform cultural critique and
    its established genre conventions?
  * Which media historical and -structural changes have occasioned the
    contemporary heterogeneity of cultural critics in the media, and how
    do media systemic and/or, national/cross-national cultural
    perspectives play into this?
  * What are the interplay of celebrity culture and cultural critique in
    regard to, for example, journalists’ self-branding,
    micro-celebrities and amateur critics, the cultural critic as a
    celebrity/the celebrity as cultural critic?
  * How can we understand changing notions of authority and expertise in
    cultural critique and/or conceptualize cultural authority and media
    visibility?
  * What is the role and/or interplay of various types of (digital)
    media in producing and reproducing cultural critics?

*Guest editors *(to whom abstracts should be submitted)*:*

Helle Kannik Haastrup (h.k.haastrup /at/ hum.ku.dk) <mailto:(h.k.haastrup /at/ hum.ku.dk)> (University of Copenhagen, Dept. of Nordic Studies) &

Nete Nørgaard Kristensen (netenk /at/ hum.ku.dk) <mailto:(netenk /at/ hum.ku.dk)> (University of Copenhagen, Dept. of Media, Cognition and Communication)

*Deadlines:*

  * Submission of abstracts (300 words max): June 12 2017
  * Invitation to submit full articles: July 1 2017
  * Submission of articles: February 1 2018
  * Publication: November/December 2018

**

*Practical information: *

The open call invites proposals in both English and the Scandinavian languages.

See call for papers: http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/mediekultur/announcement/view/505





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