[Commlist] Digital Intimacies 9: "life among the ruins"

We are so pleased to see the Digital Intimacies symposium continue on, 
now in its 9th  year. Following the fabulous Swinburne/ADM+S Sexy Messy 
symposium earlier this year, the Digital Intimacies 9 symposium is to be 
held at QUT December 14 + 15. Co-hosted by the QUT Digital Media 
Research Centre and the Digital Cultures & Societies group at UQ. The 
full CFP is copied below: abstracts now extended until Sept 1!

More information is available on the website here:

https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/digital-intimacies-9/

+++

    The Digital Intimacies 9 call for papers is now live! This year the
    theme is "life among the ruins":

          "Without stories of progress, the world has become a
        terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its
        abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less
        avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company,
        human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges
        of our blasted landscapes…" (Tsing, 2015, pp. 282).

    Digital intimate publics express that the “vibe is off”, a sense
    that things aren’t quite right as we doom scroll on and on and on. A
    state of precarity and instability has left ruin and decay in its
    wake. From failed political systems, burnt-out utopias and bombed
    out landscapes, to the eerie and empty urban spaces of the mass
    industrial era, the persistent rubble left from (neo)colonisation
    and cultures threatened by climate crises, to recently obsolescent
    technologies, hyperlinks rotting away, and glitchy automated systems.

    Despite the rubble seeming dead and inert, Anna Tsing (2015) reminds
    us that ruins are lively places where new multi-species and
    multi-cultures thrive. From a flattened out, ruined landscape, new
    possibilities grow. Ruins can be enclaves of hope as much as
    mourning, loss, and longing: they not only invoke nostalgic
    reflections, but open up space to dream and imagine the future.

    Digital intimate publics share the affective experience of life amid
    the ruin. They are formed in circumstances of something being ‘off’,
    of being squeezed, constituted from positions of non-dominance.
    Digital intimacies come to be not in the gleaming corporate towers
    and cathedrals, but in the messy in-between spaces where resilient,
    creative practices of ‘making do’ emerge.

    For Digital Intimacies 9 we ask in what ways are digital intimacies
    reckoning with the ruined structures they find themselves in? We
    invite submissions across disciplines to critically engage with,
    interpret, locate, theorise, or dissect the notion of life amid the
    ruins in abstract and creative ways. Additionally we encourage
    applicants to think broadly about the intersections between digital
    intimate publics and ruins to look with a hopeful eye for what may
    grow on the edges of our worlds.

    We welcome papers and presentations in various formats exploring
    topics including but not restricted to:

    ·Everyday responses to ruin.

    ·Tactics and strategies of ‘making do’.

    ·Obsolescent technologies and outdated digital media.

    ·The politics of nostalgia and the future.

    ·Stories, voices and practices from the margins.

    ·Resistance, opposition and subversion in digital spaces.

    ·Community, kinship and care during and after crises.

    ·As well as papers covering broader questions and topics relating to
    digital intimacies.

    References:

    Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the
    possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.

    To submit please email (digitalcultures /at/ hass.uq.edu.au)
    <mailto:(digitalcultures /at/ hass.uq.edu.au)> with a 200-300 word abstract
    and a 1-2 sentence bio by August 25th.

    The symposium will be a hybrid event held from the 14^th  to the
    15^th  of December at QUT Gardens Point campus (lift access
    available) and online.

    Digital intimacies 9 is jointly hosted by the Digital Media Research
    Centre at Queensland University of Technology and Digital Cultures &
    Society at University of Queensland.

    For more information check out our website:
    https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/digital-intimacies-9/
    <https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/digital-intimacies-9/>. If you
    have any further questions please feel free to email Digital
    Cultures and Societies UQ at (digitalcultures /at/ hass.uq.edu.au)
    <mailto:(digitalcultures /at/ hass.uq.edu.au)>.


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