[ecrea] digital existence II: Precarious Media Life - Call for contributions

Call for contributions

“DIGITAL EXISTENCE II: Precarious Media Life”

Conference October 30-November 1, 2017, at the Sigtuna Foundation, Sweden

**

Digital media have the power to transform our existence, raising 
particular questions and vulnerabilities as part of the experience of 
being human in the digital age. Big data and hyperconnectivity, tracking 
and trolling, digital life and digital death are only some of the issues 
that require an existential media analysis that underscores the 
precarity of human existence. This conference will be devoted to 
critically mapping the various digital vulnerabilities that face us in 
our contemporary media age.

*/Confirmed keynote speakers:/*

//

*Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown University, USA*

*Jeremy Stolow, Concordia University, Canada*

*Beverley Skeggs, Goldsmiths College,**UK*

//

Endnote speaker: *Peter-Paul Verbeek, University of Twente, Holland*

**

Following on from the conference “Digital Existence: Memory, Meaning, 
Vulnerability” organised by DIGMEX and the Nordic Network for Media and 
Religion in October 2015 (et.ims.su.se), which successfully opened up 
the field of existential media studies, the second Digital Existence 
conference will specifically focus on the precarity and vulnerability of 
the digital human condition.

Focusing on the keyword /vulnerability/ raises a number of questions 
that invite fresh answers. For instance: does hyper-connectivity imply a 
heightened sense of connective presence – through social media, tagging, 
and sharing selfies – and/or is anxiety and loneliness saturating our 
mundane being-in-and-with-the-digital-world? How do big data, tracking 
and mass surveillance affect our sense of ‘existential security’? What 
is the role of technological affordances for producing cultures of 
affirmation and shared celebration – as well as cultures of trolling and 
hate? What existential challenges are involved when our selves are 
distributed? What kind of human being and types of sociality are 
normatively forged in digital culture? And what regimes of knowledge, 
truth and belief are prompted by digital means for measurement, 
recording and visualization? How are digital tools meaningful (or not) 
for those exposed to extreme conditions of precarity, such as displaced 
and refugee populations?  How does the internet shape how we are born 
and celebrate, die and mourn? And if digital technologies mediate 
transcendence, what are the exposures and values of such forms of 
technospirituality? Such questions will need to be engaged within a 
reframing of the digital beyond the prevailing frameworks of  social, 
cultural, political and economic analyses. They invoke existential 
issues that require an existential media analysis that foregrounds the 
precarity of human existence (Lagerkvist 2016). This conference will 
therefore unearth the diverse renditions of vulnerability that face us 
in digital existence.

In /Precarious Life/, Judith Butler (2004) argues for conceiving of 
vulnerability as a precondition of being and becoming human – as an 
ontological given – bound by the fact that we are relational beings, 
exposed to one another. We are exposed, that is, by virtue of being 
finite, dependent and limited; and that exposure and vulnerability are 
what constitutes us as moral beings. The utterance of vulnerability, she 
holds,//will enact its very acknowledgement, and such a performance will 
bring about something important: “Vulnerability takes on another meaning 
at the moment it is recognized and recognition wields the power to 
reconstitute vulnerability“ (2004: 43). This conference takes this 
acknowledgement as its point of departure: naming vulnerability as part 
of the preconditions for /being human in the digital age, /may similarly 
forge a fresh and timely perspective on our /precarious media life./ Our 
very being is one of limits and incompleteness. Human communication 
itself is limited (cf. Pinchevski 2005). The boundedness by limits also 
applies to the limitations (and vulnerabilities) of technologies 
themselves, due to breaches of and glitches within the systems. Digital 
existence is constituted both of and within limits. In Karl Jasper’s 
philosophy the limit-situation of crisis, loss or guilt (Jaspers 1932) 
in itself constitutes a space that also brings forth or enables new 
possibilities; these are today entangled with the digital. The 
conference will therefore also seek to highlight the enabling aspects of 
limitation and vulnerability. While concurring with a cautious 
universalist position, conceiving of vulnerability and suffering as 
transformative existential experiences that create a “tenuous ‘we’ of us 
all” (Butler, 2004: 20), the conference will simultaneously stress the 
diverging, unevenly distributed, locally specific, and often 
culturally-variable dimensions of our digital vulnerability. Thus, our 
inescapable existential uncertainty is amplified both by the 
technological culture and socio-political order (Bauman 2007). And 
aspects of digital media expose us /differently /in different national 
and cultural settings across the world, and with different racialized 
and gendered implications (Citron 2014, Chun & Friedland 2015). Hence, 
in conversation with existential philosophy, the interrogation of the 
ways in which our media societies and technologies position us as 
vulnerable, may furthermore harness broader debates on vulnerability, 
frailty and debility in feminism, crip theory, posthumanism, sociology, 
postcolonial theory etc.

We are looking for contributions in the shape of position papers that 
highlight various thematic aspects of digital vulnerability, relating 
for instance to birth, death, presence, memory, trauma, selfhood, 
agency, sociality, ethics, religiosity, exile, trolling, hate, 
surveillance, virality, automation, mental illness, debility or the 
precariousness of technologies themselves.

*//*

*/Conference format /*

The conference will adopt an exploratory workshop format with the aim of 
creating new trajectories of thought. This is by deliberately veering 
away from conventional paper presentations followed by a discussion 
toward a more open-ended but at the same time intellectually intensive 
framework.  The success of the conference will therefore depend on 
participants’ commitment, which will involve a fair amount of in advance 
preparation.  First, each participant is required to submit beforehand a 
concise position or ‘provocation’ paper consisting of 1000 words, or 2 
pages. These position papers will be used as a starting point for 
opening the discussion, and need not include polished statements or 
comprehensive conclusions/arguments but should present ideas or cases in 
relation to the overarching theme.

All participants will be expected to read all positions papers, which 
will be made available electronically well before the conference. 
Participants are also expected to come well prepared with comments and 
feedback. A /chair/ will be assigned for each session, and those 
selected for the job will be contacted with specific instructions.  Each 
session will begin by a short recap of relevant position papers, 
followed by invited responses by 2-3 discussants, continuing with an 
open discussion. The overall idea is to build on previous reading and 
preparation by participants in order to advance in our thinking on the 
conference themes as far as possible.

During Day II of the conference there will be a walk-and-talk session 
where participants will be encouraged to step outside and walk in groups 
through the magnificent Sigtuna area while continuing the conversation. 
These walking-and-talking discussion groups will then reconvene to a 
full plenum discussion.  Later that day there will be a screening or 
performance in relation to the theme of digital vulnerability. On the 
final day there will be a writing session. The conference will end with 
a final plenary with keynote speakers and respondents, and an assigned 
discussant who will be asked to also round up the conference in a brief 
endnote. This will be followed by an open discussion with a focus on how 
to move further within DIGMEX in terms of conferences, workshops, 
publications and research collaborations.

*//*

*/Important dates/*

Deadline for abstracts of 200 words, bio and contact details: *March 15, 
2017* (Send them to (katerina.linden /at/ ims.su.se))

Notification of acceptance: *April 15, 2017*

Deadline for confirmation of attendance: *April 30, 2017*

Deadline for submitting position papers: *August 20, 2017*

//

*/Practical information/*

The Sigtuna Foundation is a beautiful venue, located in medieval 
Sigtuna. only 15 minutes from Stockholm’s main airport (Arlanda). 
http://www.sigtunastiftelsen.se/?lang=en

*//*

No fee will be charged for this event, and lodging and food for 
attendees presenting a position paper will be covered by the conference 
budget. There is an option to participate without presenting and this 
would imply covering the expenses by other means. Presenters will cover 
their own trips to Sigtuna! A limited number of master students may 
receive a scholarship covering their travels.

//

The organising committee consists of Amanda Lagerkvist (Head of 
programme), Katerina Linden (Conference co-ordinator), Michael 
Westerlund, Timothy Hutchings, Amit Pinchevski, Charles Ess, Mia 
Lövheim, Anna Reading and Tony Walter.

//

//

*/Funding/*

The conference is organised by DIGMEX, a network within the research 
programme *EXISTENTIAL TERRAINS: Memory and Meaning in Cultures of 
Connectivity (2014-2018) *(et.ims.su.se) and funded by Knut and Alice 
Wallenberg Foundation, the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation and 
Stockholm University, in collaboration with Sigtunastiftelsen. The 
programme is headed by Amanda Lagerkvist, PhD. Associate Professor, 
Wallenberg Academy Fellow in The Department of Media Studies at 
Stockholm University.** Questions about the research programme may be 
directed to Amanda Lagerkvist:  (amanda.lagerkvist /at/ ims.su.se)

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