[ecrea] Digital Intimacies 4: Porousness & Permutations CFP

*abstracts close June 30 for Digital Intimacies 4*.


*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 speakers: *

*Professor Jessica Ringrose,*University College London;

*Associate Professor Shaka McGlotten*, Purchase College, State 
University of New York.

Please submit *abstracts of 250-300 words to 
**(digitalintimacies /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 at **https://digint18.tumblr.com/cfp*


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