[ecrea] Digital Violence Symposium CALL FOR PAPERS

With apologies for cross posting, please see below a call for papers for 
the upcoming Digital Violence Symposium, sponsored by ARCMedia at Anglia 
Ruskin University.



*Digital Violence: A Symposium*

*Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom*

*Saturday, November 4^th 2017*

**

*Keynote Speakers:*

*Caetlin Benson-Allott (Georgetown University)*

*Eugenia Siapera & Debbie Ging (Dublin City University)*

**

We live in an age where images of violence and violent exchanges 
proliferate and spread with unprecedented speed across multiple 
platforms. Graphic and disturbing images of violence—from viral videos 
of rape exchanged on Whatsapp, to the live streaming of fatal shootings 
on Facebook and Periscope—have become a staple of our digital condition. 
Similarly, resurgent forms of racialized, misogynistic, and homophobic 
violence are routinely documented, decried, or simply shrugged off as 
the ‘new normal’ of contemporary media culture.

While much attention is paid to the content of such encounters, and 
alarms sounded about the nature of our access and exposure to them, less 
concerted critical effort has been directed towards thinking 
specifically about how the technological affordances of networked media 
feed into and amplify this culture of violence. And yet, as Lisa 
Nakamura reminds us in relation to the viral racism that abounds on 
post-digital platforms, digital violence is always both ‘a product and a 
process’: the very real impact of violence in a digital age needs 
therefore to be traced through the often obscure, invisible, or simply 
mundane operations that both produce and sustain it (Nakamura 2014: 
260). Following on from Wendy Chun’s more recent contention that ‘our 
media matter most when they seem not to matter at all,’ how might we 
re-frame our understanding of violence as inhering in (banal and often 
unconscious) /habits/, in contrast to more common-sense notions of 
violence as a spectacular affective disruption of the status quo (Chun 
2016: 1; 13)?

This one-day symposium on Digital Violence seeks to theorize both the 
/concrete forms/ of violence that proliferate and spread through our 
networked screens, and the /complex processes/ that structure violence 
in a post-digital attention ecology. What are the social and cultural 
logics that underpin everyday instances of violence? In what specific 
ways have these cultural understandings been shaped by technological 
processes of mediation? Similarly, there is a vital need for scholars to 
identify uses of media, which might expose, critique, or appropriate 
violence in its various forms. What critical or creative practices of 
archiving, excavation, and uncovering are needed to unearth and engage 
violence in a digital age?

Possible topics and questions may include (but are not limited to):

·How are specific instances of violence captured, made visible, and/or 
obscured through the use of hashtags, such as #black lives matter, 
#notaskingforit, #WhyIStayed?

·What is the relationship between race, new technologies and violence? 
What critical methodologies might enable us to evaluate ‘how racism and 
antiblackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances of 
our present order’ (Browne 2015: 9)?

·How has the emergent affect and attention ecology of social media 
impacted on the ‘resurgent forms of political violence’ in the era of 
Trump? (Andrejevic 2016).

·In what ways do social media platforms encourage ‘digital complicity’ 
with institutionalized forms of violence? (Kuntsman and Stein 2015).


·What role do social media and other digital platforms play in 
extending, countering, or buffering the ‘violent or negative affective 
states produced by an ever-threatening world’ (Grusin 2010: 112).


·What impact do the micro-temporalities and speeds of digital 
technologies and infrastructures have on the ways in which we understand 
and respond to violence and its relation to both human and non-human 
agents? (Nixon 2011; Parikka 2016).


·How do users of key platforms engage with and respond to images of 
violence? How are affective responses to violence solicited and 
conditioned by the affordances of such platforms? And what is the 
potential ‘political utility’ of a ‘social media novelty’ such as 
Facebook Live (Benson-Allott 2016)?


·How has digital feminist activism sought to challenge dominant cultural 
beliefs about violence and rape culture as ‘a fact of life’ (Phipps et 
al. 2017)? What ‘new connections’ might be enabled by particular uses of 
social media platforms and other examples of digital mediation (Keller, 
Mendes & Ringrose 2016)?

Conference Organisers: Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall

Please send a 300-word abstract and a brief bio to 
(Tanya.Horeck /at/ anglia.ac.uk) <mailto:(Tanya.Horeck /at/ anglia.ac.uk)>

by 31 July 2017.

Sponsored by the Anglia Research Centre in Media & Culture

www.arcresearch.org.uk <http://www.arcresearch.org.uk>


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