[ecrea] CFP: Pleasures of Violence

Call for Papers

Pleasures of Violence

*Conference to be held at Oxford Brookes University (Oxford, UK)*

March 7-8,2019

It has become a truism to claim that social media bring out the worst in 
us. But who gets to be the subjects and the agents of violence in an 
economy built to repackage violence? In Updating to Remain the Same 
Habitual New Media, Wendy Chun exposes the hypocritical dissonance 
between our fantasies about the Internet and our online practices. For 
instance, we are continually surprised at the leaking of a network that 
is precisely built to leak; or we project the promiscuousness of 
networks onto bodies that aren’t supposed to matter. Digitality has 
become, then, indissociable from questions of injury, aggression and 
pre-determined targets. Such impulses of violent digitality have further 
become central spectacles on cinema, television and video game screens.  
Why does the digital seem so well suited for the most insidious and 
blatant of death drives?


 From misogyny to racism, from trolling to warfare, from disaster porn 
to revenge porn, to be immersed in popular visual culture is to have to 
negotiate the circulation, broadcasting and spectacle of violence. Is 
digital violence the re-enactment of analog modes of violence or a brand 
new kind of economy? Have digital networks simply brought to the surface 
the cesspool of destructive desires that whirled beneath surfaces all 
along, or do they facilitate unprecedented modes of acting out, and 
suffering from, violence? How might we, scholars and creative 
practitioners, imagine ways of combating or repairing violence?

This conference aims to consider questions of abuse, misuse of power and 
aggression in the (post-)digital age from a variety of perspectives and 
fields, exploring the relationship between violence (physical, 
psychological, symbolic, et al) and digitality writ large. It also takes 
seriously the pleasures on offer through such digital violence, whether 
that is the action cinema’s fight sequence or the trainwreck celebrity. 
Is “digital violence” a redundant category? How does violence play out 
in different national contexts and creative industries: cinema, gaming, 
photography, music, fashion?

We welcome abstracts that centre on, but are not limited to the following:


* Doxing, firehosing, gaslighting: The New Language of Violence

* Representations of violence in contemporary TV, cinema, series and 
podcasts

* Bot-enacted gender and racial violence

* The relationships between genre and violence

* Digital terrorisms

* The digital circulation of xenophobia

* Disaster porn, revenge porn and other types of sexual violence

* Online communities of violence and self-harm

* Outing as a form of violence

* Youtubeas platform for confessing violence

* Social media, feminism and the exposure of rape culture

* The weaponization of gossip, hearsay, fake news and misinformation

* BDSM online communities: The New Erotic Possibilities of Violence

* Biometric technologies of racial violence

* Necro/Bio-political violence

* Neo-colonial violence

* Glamourization and fetishization of violence

Please send abstracts of 250 – 300 words, with a supporting bio of no 
more than 100 words, to (violenceconferencebrookes /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(violenceconferencebrookes /at/ gmail.com)>


*Abstract deadline: Monday 31st of December 2018.*


*Dr Diego Semerene*
Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Digital Media
/Oxford Brookes University/
@diegosemerene

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