[Commlist] CfP Nostalgia Symposium 2024

CfP Time in a Bottle: Containers and Criticisms of Nostalgia Symposium 2024

*About*
The NOSTAGAIN Network, a research collective focused on 
interdisciplinary approaches to nostalgia, is launching its second 
symposium on the 2nd February, 2024 at Concordia University, Montreal.


*Symposium Theme*.
As we emerge from a global period of great loss, sacrifice, and patience 
into a “new normal” fraught with conflict, ecological crisis, and rapid 
sociotechnical change…digital nostalgia has taken a turn towards 
encapsulation.

Specifically, how does the cultural significance of 1) NOSTALGIC OBJECTS 
and thus the 2) OBJECTS WE USE TO BE NOSTALGIC of other things influence 
the digital nostalgia we engage in? These containers of time are 
comparable to bottles full of ideological messages which recall a 
rose-tinted past, a somber future, a present tinged with grief.

On social media, custom-made pop-culture dioramas are sold out to buyers 
eager to preserve the set of their favorite childhood video game or TV 
show. Meanwhile, costs of supporting digital cloud storage to hoard our 
pasts mount while we risk forgetting it anyway. Large language models 
“speak” from the frozen moments of their training data, stuck between 
the past and the next update. Those who itch for clairvoyance seek their 
own remembrance as cold comfort: in 2019, over 25,000 Koreans engaged in 
therapeutic “living funerals,” donning burial shrouds, posing for their 
own memorial portraits, and lying inside real coffins as the living 
chant prayers for the “dead”.

- If these items could talk, what “message in a bottle” do they have for us?
- What are the social, ecological, and cultural impacts left in the 
present by our pursuit of the nostalgic past or future?
- How far will we go to preview, pay, and pursue a time outside the present?

CfP webpage: https://nostagain.ca/cfp2024 <https://nostagain.ca/cfp2024>


*Who?*
We are inviting media, communication, and interdisciplinary scholars to 
submit a paper presentation or research-creation to our symposium. The 
symposium is also hybrid, so virtual presentations will be 
considered, but in-person is prioritized.


*Submission Guidelines*
- Presentation abstracts are limited to 300 words.
- Research-creation abstracts are 500 words, with an option to attach media.

The hard deadline for both is *5th January 2024*
- All submissions are reviewed on an ongoing basis


*Contact*
Contact: (projectlostagain /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(projectlostagain /at/ gmail.com)> 
to Derek Pasborg or Richy Srirachanikorn
Website: https://nostagain.ca/cfp2024 <https://nostagain.ca/cfp2024>

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