[ecrea] CFP - Porting Media

*/Porting Media II/**Conference - **October 12-14, 2017*

*Concordia University and McGill University*

*Montreal, Québec, Canada*

**

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_Keynote speakers:_

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Deborah Cowen (Geography and Planning, University of Toronto)

Ramon Lobato (School of Media and Communications, RMIT

             University, Melbourne)

_Call for Papers:_

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Media and ports have this in common: they are apparatuses that connect 
geographically distant places through logistics of transfer and 
communication. /Porting/, on the other hand, designates the ongoing 
process of translation, transformation, mediation or contact. This 
conference calls for an examination of the mechanisms of enfolding or 
assembly (and likewise friction or disconnection) that porting 
designates, with an eye to topics such as geopolitics, vicarity, 
intersectionality, televisuality, logistics, digital platforms, 
occupations, and environmental media, among others, and a concern with 
their emplacement in a global frame.

This conference draws on multiple meanings of the term /porting /to 
investigate processes of media trans/portation, entanglement, and 
transfiguration across distinct geopolitical contexts and contact zones. 
It takes as its starting point the idea of /porting /as a process for 
adapting software or hardware so it can be executed outside of its 
original design or environment. Porting, in other words, carries 
something over from one system to another—signaling abstraction, 
virtuality, exchange, transformation, reassembly, standardization, and 
so on. To focus on this mechanism is to reveal the play of power and 
force in multiple milieus, in the movement of a text, software, or 
commodity in transformative circulation. The moment of porting reveals 
not simply certain ideological machinations—cultural imperialism, 
homogenization, hybridization, and so on—but also exposes the 
materiality, forms of embodiment, and geographies of this medial 
mechanism. In short, the provocation of this conference is to engage 
/porting/, and related concepts,//as a way to explore, critique, and 
expand understandings of media globalization. In dialogue with current 
work on circulation, infrastructures, logistics, ecologies, 
atmospherics, intersectionality, and cultural theory, we invite 
proposals that focus on distinct porting processes: acts of carrying 
over, making work, adapting, integrating, folding, normalizing, 
overpowering, and others. Proposals that consider /porting media/ as a 
potential critical framework for the forces, objects, logistics and 
media logics that constitute the global are particularly welcome.

This call for papers is open to all and we encourage broad engagements 
with porting as concept, process, and site, including resistances to 
porting, and the forms of im-portability, friction, or untranslatability 
that always accompany it. We welcome papers that engage the following 
topics:

  * Ports, logistics, labour, capital circulation
  * Informal economy, piracy, hacking, hijacking
  * Digital platforms, technological lock-in, im-portability, monopoly
  * Tele-vision, remote sensing, and other modes of paravisuality
  * Environmental media, geo-engineering, climate control, smart cities
  * Geopolitical relations: islands and archipelagos,
    (extra)territoriality, colonial settlement, migration
  * Intersectionality, indigeneity, race, diaspora
  * Adaptation, translation, vicarity, substitution, intermediation
  * Software and hardware systems
  * Activism, publics, political society, popular culture
  * Embodiment, performance, gender, sexuality
  * Critical theory, political theory, theories of postcolonial or global
  * Stylistic, textual, and audiovisual contact zones
Please send 250-300 word abstracts and a brief biographical note to 
(portingmedia /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(portingmedia /at/ gmail.com)>by April 20, 2017. 
Information about the event will be available at https://portingmedia.com/

Porting Media is organized by Michelle Cho, Kay Dickinson, Yuriko 
Furuhata, Joshua Neves, and Marc Steinberg

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