[Commlist] CFP MedieKultur, Special Issue: Digital activism and participation: affect, feelings and politics

CFP MedieKultur, Special Issue: Digital activism and participation: 
affect, feelings and politics

The relationship between digital media and political engagement has been 
subject to intense interest in the field of media studies for the past 
several decades. Here, questions relating to connective and collective 
modes of action, affordances and the relationship between affect, 
materiality and engagement have been studied in particular in relation 
to movements with an overt activist character (e.g. Bennett and 
Segerberg 2014, Castells 2015, Highfield 2016). However, there is room 
for further exploration of the ways in which digital media have created 
new grounds for political protest.

In the shape of likes, comments, photos, videos or texts, digital media 
have generated a public audience and response to individual experience, 
personal feeling or political attitudes - consequently blurring the 
lines between digital sociality and digital activism - between the 
individual and the collective. The various ways that digital media have 
come to shape, constitute and reconfigure our everyday lives and 
practices, thus call for an investigation of existing notions of 
activism, social and political engagement. The aim of this special issue 
is, thus, to create a space for reflection on the role of digital media 
in participatory movements as new possibilities for politicizing 
personal and intimate lives emerge. We are specifically interested in 
movements that do not necessarily take a conventional activist form, and 
furthermore how affect and feelings shape these movements.

In the 1970s, the feminist catchphrase ‘The personal is political and 
the political is personal’ reinforced an understanding of private and 
public domains as mutually constitutive and inextricably connected. In 
recent years, affect theory further developed this perspective by 
arguing that feelings /are/ inherently political (e.g. Ahmed 2004, 
Papacharissi 2015, Wahl-Jorgensen 2019). Indeed, they /do/ things. Held 
together, these perspectives highlight how ‘personal’ feelings and 
affect can be drivers for political change and for the creation of 
communities of both in- and exclusion. Digital media furthermore has the 
ability to connect and create communities of spatially and socially 
dispersed individuals, offering a space for affective and ‘private’ 
connections to become public and political.

In this issue we welcome contributions that reflect upon the role of 
feelings, affects or emotions as catalysts for political participation 
or digital activism - and with this, contributions that either from a 
theoretical or empirical perspective grapple with the fundamental 
question: what can be defined as digital activist practices?

We encourage submissions that engage with one or more of the following 
questions:

·What are the boundaries and/or relation between activism and other 
kinds of social engagement via digital platforms?

·How are feelings and affects mobilized in digital spaces as catalysts 
for community building, connectivity and change?

·What are the political potentials and pitfalls of ‘the private’ in 
digital activism?

·How is everyday life and the mundane entangled with political struggles 
for change and/or recognition on social media?

·How do the potentials of digital media affect power dynamics and 
relations in activist struggles?

Please submit an abstract of maximum 500 words (excluding references) by 
April 15th 2021 on MedieKultur’s website: 
http://www.tidsskrift.dk/mediekultur 
<http://www.tidsskrift.dk/mediekultur>. Authors will be notified of 
their acceptance by May 15th 2021. The deadline for submission of full 
papers is September 1st 2021. Articles that are accepted for further 
process by the editors will go into peer-review in November 2021. We 
expect to have decisions on manuscripts and potential further revisions 
by January 2022. We expect to publish this special issue in June 2022.

Editors for this special issue: Lene Bull Christiansen (Roskilde 
University), Maj Hedegaard Heiselberg (Roskilde University) and Katrine 
Meldgaard Kjær (IT University of Copenhagen) (kakj /at/ itu.dk) 
<mailto:(kakj /at/ itu.dk)>.

MedieKultur does not take any charge for submission and publication.

References:

Ahmed, S., 2004. /The cultural politics of emotion/. London: Routledge.

Bennett, W.L. and Segerberg, A., 2014. /The logic of connective action, 
digital media and the personalization of contentious politics/. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Castells, M., 2015. /Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in 
the Internet Age. Second Edition/. Cambridge: Polity.

Highfield, T., 2016. /Social Media and Everyday Politics/. Cambridge: 
Polity.

Papacharissi, Z., 2015. /Affective Publics. Sentiment, Technology, and 
Politics./ Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wahl-Jorgensen, K., 2019. /Emotions, media and politics/. Cambridge: 
John Wiley & Sons.

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