[ecrea] CfP: Mediatized Cultural Activism

Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation



Call for papers: Mediatized Cultural Activism



Deadline: Papers must be submitted by November 15, 2014.



In recent years participatory and activist practises in the public space 
have been increasingly entangled with digital networks. This is evident 
in large-scale protests such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, the 
various activist practices related to the so-called Arab Spring, the 
Taksim Gezi Park protests, and in activists groups such as Femen, Pussy 
Riot, and Anonymous. Furthermore a proliferation of quasi-autonomous 
recognition networks of creative knowledge workers (Lievrouw 2011) has 
occurred and the boundaries between commodity culture and social 
resistance are increasingly blurred (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser 2012).

The common denominator for these highly diverse forms of protests seems 
to be that the revolting subjects (Tyler 2013), who may or may not 
invest their bodies in public spaces, rely on the documentation and 
circulation of their protests. In that sense activists’ practises are 
increasingly modelled in order to accommodate media circulation. 
Activists’ practises become mediatized (Hjarvard 2008; Hepp 2012) and 
the activist imaginary (Marcus 1996) emerges in the intersection of 
online and offline activities. Yet despite the mediatization and media 
circulation there is no guarantee that the protests will have lasting 
impact. The question thus become how the transition from mediatized 
activism to policymaking can occur and how we move from the 
technological ability to communicate to lasting connections (Zuckerman 
2013).

It is from such perspective that we invite papers that ask what digital 
and networked culture, technological apparatus, mediatization, and 
database logic do for the ways in which people participate in and 
construe activism. How does digitalization and mediatization change the 
ways in which participants invest themselves and their bodies in 
activist protests? What role do local networks play? And how do 
authorities cope when they not only have to control activist practices 
in the local space, but also in the media? Thus we seek papers that 
investigate how digital networks redesigns the modalities of activist 
participation, ask how we can understand the relation between visual 
culture and activist practises, investigates the institutional limits 
and opportunities of activism, ask who have stakes in cultural 
resistance, and investigate the possibility for cultural dissent to 
emerge as political resistance.



Camilla Møhring Reestorff

Editor in Chief, Conjunctions – Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural 
Participation

http://www.conjunctions-tjcp.com/



PhD, assistant professor

Department of Aesthetics and Communication

Aarhus University

Jens Chr. Skous Vej 2, 1485/536

8000 Århus C - Denmark

Tlf: (+45) 871 63181 / (+45) 22783252

Email: (norcmr /at/ dac.au.dk)



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