[ecrea] cfp - Digital Intimacies 4: Porousness & Permutations

Digital Intimacies 4: Porousness & Permutations
December 5, 6 & 7, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia

Digital Intimacies is now in its fourth year and continues to bring 
scholars of digital culture together from across Australia and beyond, 
across disciplines including media and communication, cultural studies, 
sociology, and gender studies. This year’s symposium is convened by 
Amy Dobson and Tama Leaver, and is hosted by Curtin University’s 
Centre for Culture and Technology and the discipline of Internet Studies 
in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry.

As social media open up intimate lives and practices to public and 
semi-public gazes, we are in the midst of important cultural 
contestations over the meaning of intimacy.  How intimacy plays out in, 
and in relation to, the digital has become a prominent concern in 
scholarship of digital cultures, as well as in broader public debate. 
Intimacy is generally understood as to do with the ‘personal’ and 
with ‘closeness’ — as describing feelings or relationships that 
are most ‘inward to one’s personhood’ (McGlotten, 2013). But, as 
much queer and social theory tells us, intimacy is also socially and 
culturally constructed and sanctioned, defined by institutions, laws, 
and social and cultural norms and practices. Norms around various kinds 
of intimacies and intimate practices involving media increasingly play 
out online, and via social media platforms. Digital platforms are 
structured by a ‘like’ economy (Gerlitz and Helmond, 2013), by 
drives towards the quantification of self (Lupton, 2016), and 
algorithms, as well as algorithmic ‘imaginaries’ (Bucher, 2018; 
Carah and Angus 2018). Digital intimacy has been described in this 
context as a new kind of social capital (Lambert, 2016), as well as new 
media ‘genre’ (Raun, 2018). Practices of certain kinds of intimacies 
via the digital are increasingly seen as vital to ‘successful’ and 
economically productive use of social media, especially for cultural 
intermediaries and ‘internet celebrities’ (Abidin, 2018). 
Simultaneously, many forms of intimacy and communication are being 
encoded, aggregated, analysed and commercialized as forms of big data, 
provoking difficult and unsettling questions about new forms of 
surveillance, influence, and control, as well as distinct lack of 
transparency around new practices and forms of governance, made publicly 
visible around recent Cambridge Analytica scandals (Andrejevic, 2013; 
Leaver, 2017).

We are calling for paper abstracts on the themes of digital media, 
digital cultures, and intimacy, with particular interest in porousness 
and permutations of every kind; that is, papers that map the flow 
between boundaries – shifts and permeations of  practice and 
understanding towards new forms, new configurations, and the unsettling 
existing norms in unexpected and as yet unnamed ways.

Within these broadly understood boundaries of digital culture(s) and 
digital intimacies we invite particular exploration of:
* how existing structures, boundaries and norms of intimacy are 
constituted, reconstituted and made porous in terms of identities, 
practices and platforms;
* how practices of intimacy via the digital can be challenged, changed 
and new permutations emerge in terms of the social, cultural, and political;
* how ‘digital disruption’ (of various sorts) shapes, configures, 
constitutes and impacts intimacy of every kind.

The single stream symposium will formally run for two days, December 5 
and 6. Following the successful implementation at last year’s 
symposium, an optional third day for more focused workshopping, writing, 
and project planning, driven by the intersections made visible during 
the two conference days, will be available of December 7th for those who 
wish to participate.

Keynote speaker: Professor Jessica Ringrose from University College 
London; further keynote speaker to be announced soon.

Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words (todigitalintimacies /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(digitalintimacies /at/ gmail.com)>by June 30, 2018. We will send 
notifications of acceptances out by the end of July.

We are hoping to make this a low-cost event, especially for students, 
but there will be a small registration fee to cover costs.

Details athttps://digint18.tumblr.com/cfp <https://digint18.tumblr.com/cfp>



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