Archive for calls, July 2010

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[ecrea] CFP Media and Transport (SCMS New Orleans)

Thu Jul 15 20:52:31 GMT 2010



This panel seeks papers that interrogate the relationship between media and transport and attempt to rethink media through the lens of transportation and vice versa. At a metaphoric level, transport indicates carrying away, in the sense of physical mobility, movement between worlds, and even emotional ecstasy. Understanding the term in this way can lead to fruitful new ways of understanding media technologies.

In a cultural historical vein, some scholars, such as Ben Bachmair and Lynn Kirby, have called attention to the pervasiveness of transportation preceding and accompanying the omnipresence of communication devices in which the culture of the transportation system paves the way for the ensuing media form. More broadly, theorists such as El Lissitsky and Rudolf Arnheim have analogized forms of transportation to forms of communication, and still others, chiefly Marshall McLuhan include vehicles of all sorts as media. This panel defines media broadly to include visual and aural forms with electronic, digital, and mechanical systems of production and transportation.

 

Possible topics include (but certainly are not limited to):

·       Transportation as metaphor for media (information superhighway)

·       Transportation as analog for aesthetic experience (e.g. Schivelbusch’s Railway Journey)

·       Historical relationship between transportation and media forms (e.g. railroad and film)

·       Media forms on transportation systems (wifi on airplanes, tvs in automobiles)

·       Media theories which rely on transport metaphors or analogs (e.g. the writings of Rudolf Arnheim, Walter Benjamin, Harold Innis, El Lissitsky, Fillippo Marinetti, Marshall McLuhan, or Paul Virilio)

·       The aesthetics of transport

·       Media and transport as technologies of space-time mastery and control

 

Please send 300-500 word abstracts by August 9 to (Stephen_Groening /at/ brown.edu)


Stephen Groening

Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Brown University
Department of Modern Culture and Media
155 George Street
Box 1957
Providence RI 02912-1957

(Stephen_Groening /at/ Brown.edu)




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