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[Commlist] Call for Papers: Violent Labour and Media

Wed Jul 10 11:26:25 GMT 2024


Call for Papers: Violent Labour and Media

A special issue of Media Theory (medatheoryjournal.org)

How are media implicated in the expansion of violent labour? Are media playing a larger, more structural role in violent labour than they have in the past? How can we intervene in this material transformation of culture, politics, and economics? The aim of this special issue is to explore the relationship between violent labour and media in theory and practice.

More than dominating the stories told in our culture industries, violent labour (work that involves violence) also dominates much of our daily lives. While the U.S. Department of Defense employs over 4 million people, violent labour statistics should be extended to include everything from security companies to weapons manufacturing, police, prison staff, and beyond (Seigel 2018). Teachers, health care providers, and general care workers are increasingly trained to respond to violence as well, and to employ it if necessary. In the aftermath of school shootings, teachers, along with police and security professionals, are evaluated as violent labourers: did they follow procedures? Did they close the door to protect the class, or risk leaving it open to invite in students trapped in hallways? Did they attack, hide, or run, and was it the right workplace decision?

Our media, whether emerging, dominant, or residual, are structurally implicated in the presence of violent labour in our economy and in our lives. Data and lists are understood as instruments for managing armies and revolutions and for waging cyberwar (Packer and Reeves 2020, Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko 2019); artificial intelligence is routinely deployed to yield favourable outcomes in asymmetrical conflicts (Jensen et al. 2020); drone warfare has evolved since the Obama years with a range of applications in global hot zones like Palestine and the Ukraine (Ganguly 2024); and war reporters covering violent conflicts on the ground are increasingly unprotected by the safeguards of “embedded journalism” (Карпчук and Макар 2023).

Violent media extends to a larger suite of labour practices as well: content moderators from the Global South, hired by Google and Meta, are tasked with absorbing violent images and with constructing moral standards about how violent media is communicated (Gillespie 2021; Risewieck and Block 2018); distribution companies like Amazon aim to deskill and de-unionize workers through automation (Crawford 2022); and digital divides persist, which aggravates the capacity of workers to improve their lives, whether in disadvantaged parts of the world or in rural and remote areas of wealthier countries (Parks et al. 2023).

Media studies already draws connections between violent labour and media, just without using the term. For instance, social media are reckoned for their capacities to organize violent labour to harm through fake news, flame wars, hate speech, disinformation and political polarization (Pé rez-Escolar and Noguera 2022); safety alerts and policing apps carry a net psychological impact on users who are trained to become vigilant of their immediate physical surroundings to potential threats (Ellcessor 2022); while tracking devices, algorithmic surveillance, and social media addictions contribute to the enshittification of the social world by tech (Doctorow 2024). Altogether, the expanded field of violent media promotes an insidious “militarization of thinking” (Amoore 2009).

Popular critiques of media, especially new and social media, are often framed in terms of the injuries media are supposed to threaten us with. However, insofar as such popular critiques are theoretical, they are often abstract, resting on a notion of violence disarticulated from concrete experiences of late capitalism and imperialism. Theorizing the relationship between violence and media and a particular form of labour – violent labour – imposes a materializing discipline and an opportunity to tell us things we didn’t know about our media that our theories may have missed.

This issue seeks to bring to the forefront in our theory how media are structurally implicated in the expansion of violent labour around the world. Contributors are encouraged to propose submissions that take an expansive approach to our reckoning of violent labour and media, and to push the boundaries of how we understand the past, present, and possible futures for the relations between violence, labour, and media.

Editor

This special issue will be edited by Michael Epp, Professor of Cultural Studies at Trent University, and Joshua Synenko, Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Trent University. Submissions and inquiries can be sent to (editors /at/ mediatheoryjournal.org)

Timeline

Please send an abstract of 300 words by September 15, 2024. Please note: There are no APCs associated with this journal or this special issue.
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