[Commlist] CFP: Twenty-First Century Media? Affective Bodies, Crowds and Collectives

*
CFP: Twenty-First Century Media? Affective Bodies, Crowds and Collectives*

21-23 March, 2024, Delhi, India.

In the last two decades, digital media infrastructures have spread 
worldwide, including the global South. Despite inequalities of access, 
low-cost mobile devices and cheaper broadband have connected large 
subaltern populations to media infrastructures. The effects are 
increasingly planetary, initiating a series of debates in media 
scholarship and cultural theory. Mediatisation has emerged as a material 
field that drives circulation, sharing, and modification, generating 
intense rhythms of political engagement and action. We are interested in 
this junction, the combinations of sensory media infrastructures with 
political metamorphoses.

These shifts channel in novel ways the “structure of feeling” theorized 
in the last century by Raymond Williams.  Digital media infrastructures 
have been productive of affective body politics, where haptic 
engagement, the intuitive technicity of devices, and psychic collective 
are routinely entangled. Everyday experiences of governance, the rapid 
flow of news through devices, algorithmic prediction, the triggers of 
war, trauma and phatic online connections are all part of this landscape 
of 21st century media. At the same time, artists, activists and 
filmmakers involved in social movements across the world have been 
eclectic in their practices, scrambling divisions between 20th and 
21st-century media through mashup and mixing techniques.

The emergence of digital media in the 21st century was hailed as opening 
new avenues of participation, immersion and resistance. Recent 
diagnostic critiques have focused on the ‘feed-forward’ nature of 21st 
century digital media, the “shift from a past-directed recording 
platform to a data-driven anticipation of the future” (Hansen), the 
routinisation of spectacle in everyday life and the destruction of 
sleep(Crary), the expansion of surveillance and control with 
platforms(Zuboff). The contagious nature of social media generates 
cycles of imitation: shaping social movements, populist collectives, 
mis/disinformation, info-wars, and political stardom. Digital media 
animates bodies, connects technical and natural environments, posing 
pressing questions for techno-social milieus worldwide.  Global media 
platforms produce remarkable interventions: troll farms from Russia 
periodically intervene in overseas debates, South Asian internet users 
have been active in online flame wars and misinformation on Israel/Gaza. 
We see a blurring of older divisions between diasporic, international, 
and domestic publicity; mis/disinformation pipelines are increasingly 
dynamic.

In this workshop, we are interested in site-specific contributions 
mapping 21st century media, addressing material and environmental 
questions for media and political aesthetics. While we are open to 
diagnostic and media-theory contributions, we will give weightage to 
abstracts that bring in original research.  In particular, we welcome 
contributions from the Global South.

*Themes*

The forensic turn in media scholarship: case studies.
Structures of Feeling: feed-forward, addictive media, and new 
time-spaces of media events.
Inhabiting Mis/disinformation: Beyond True and False.
Persistence of 20th-century media? Cinema, video, sound and the 
contemporary.
Circulation techniques: Pipelines, Info-war and comparative studies of 
21st Century propaganda and publicity.
21st century celebrity culture: influencers, microcelebrities and the 
political.
Affective Bodies: audiences, publics and collectives in an emergent 
digital universe of political aesthetics.
21st Century television: media events, political spectacle, liveness.
Law and 21st-century media: platforms, content moderation and takedown 
notices.


Please submit a 500-word abstract by 10 December 2023, along with a 
paragraph-length bio to (digitalnetworksworkshop /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(digitalnetworksworkshop /at/ gmail.com)>. In your abstract please 
mention at least one of the themes mentioned above. Practice-based 
contributions which address the conceptual lens of the workshop are also 
welcome.  Selected speakers will be required to share a draft paper with 
discussants before the workshop.

This workshop is organised by the Indo-German research collaboration 
ICAS-MP <https://micasmp.hypotheses.org/about> and its thematic module 
Media and the Constitution of the Political (TM7). The workshop will 
take place at the Sarai <https://sarai.net/> media programme of CSDS, in 
Delhi from 21-23 March 2024. An advanced research centre, the CSDS is a 
network partner of ICAS-MP and Sarai a part of TM7. Accommodation and 
meals for the duration of the workshop will be covered by ICAS-MP. 
Selected speakers from India will also be eligible for travel support to 
Delhi. Overseas speakers are encouraged to cover travel expenses from 
their home institutions. We may be able to part-support a small number 
of need-based travel grants for selected speakers based in the Global South.

Links:

Call page: 
https://sarai.net/events/call-for-papers-twenty-first-century-media-affective-bodies-crowds-and-collectives/ 
<https://sarai.net/events/call-for-papers-twenty-first-century-media-affective-bodies-crowds-and-collectives/>

Twitter: https://twitter.com/csdsdelhi/status/1722499456166150229 
<https://twitter.com/csdsdelhi/status/1722499456166150229>

Facebook: 
https://www.facebook.com/csdsdelhi/posts/pfbid02Mkdu46NvMBpTdJAGhZCuW5mU37DjFXSV2wicBVb1ebNx2GAqerQzmmWd1FmVF8zVl 
<https://www.facebook.com/csdsdelhi/posts/pfbid02Mkdu46NvMBpTdJAGhZCuW5mU37DjFXSV2wicBVb1ebNx2GAqerQzmmWd1FmVF8zVl>

Insta: 
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzbWc6gPy5E/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link 
<https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzbWc6gPy5E/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link>


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