[ecrea] CFP: Media Studies Symposion, 19. August – 22. August 2015

** On behalf of Nadine Taha, 
(taha /at/ medienwissenschaft.uni-siegen.de)<mailto:(taha /at/ medienwissenschaft.uni-siegen.de)> 
**

3. Medienwissenschaftliches Symposion der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft/
German Research Foundation

Connect and Divide: The Practice Turn in Media Studies
Fraueninsel im Chiemsee, 19. August – 22. August 2015

Media divide and connect simultaneously: they act as intermediaries 
between otherwise disconnected entities, and as a »middle« that 
mediates, but also shields different entities from each other. This 
ambiguity gives rise to conflicting interpretations, and it evokes all 
those figures that give a first clue about this janus-faced relationship 
of »connect and divide«: gate-keeper, parasite, amongst others. And if 
we give accounts of media before and after their mediated action, we 
refer to persons and organizations, automatisms and artifacts, signals 
and inscriptions, and we seem to find it easy to refer to their distinct 
potentials and dis/abilities. But within the interaction - the »middle« 
of media itself seems to be distributed right across the mix of 
material, semiotic and personal entities involved, and the location of 
agency is hard to pin down. In case of breakdown we have to disentangle 
the mix; in case of smooth operations action becomes all the more distribute
d and potentially untraceable – which makes its attribution a matter of 
the simultaneously occuring distribution of (official and unofficial) 
knowledge, labour and power. The empirical and historical investigation 
of this two-faced relationship of »connect and divide« has thus resulted 
in what may be called a veritable »practice turn in media studies«. The 
conference will discuss four aspects of the practice turn in media studies:

Section 1: Media History from a Praxeological Perspective, Moderation: 
Monika Dommann
Since its origins in Toronto or Freiburg Media studies have developed 
what might be called strong narratives of history, identifying causes 
and origins and often bordering on teleological narratives, and 
sometimes even making quite specific media both the telos and cause of 
fundamental historical changes. The challenge of these sometimes 
mythical narratives has inspired a host of corrections, revisions and 
reservations from professional historians, who are devoted to a cult of 
the archives (Lorraine Daston) and used to make accountable which 
evidence they can use or not use: »How can I know what I want to 
propose?« (in Marc Bloch's famous words). This skeptical question leads 
historians - and media historians alike - to a double focus on media 
practices: their own and those they have to study. Historians developed 
media studies »avant la lettre« by making the medium the message in 
their »Quellenkritik«, by making the production, distribution and 
reception of texts and
artifacts both the topic and resource of historical work. How do we 
reconstruct and deconstruct the media practices of the past? Which 
practice theories are helpful for historians, who are used to go against 
the grain of their sources and their contemporaries alike? Which new 
questions might arise when a traditional discipline like history and 
undisciplined fields like Science and Technology Studies and media 
studies exchange their theories and tools?

Section 2: Religion is as Religion Does: The Practice Turn in Religion 
and Media Studies, Moderation: Jeremy Stolow
In recent years, the study of religion has expanded dramatically, 
commensurate with the rising public visibility of diverse organizations, 
movements, and events that constitute the religious field. Scholars have 
begun to challenge the longstanding theoretical framework in which 
religions were defined as systems of ideas to which believers assented, 
and in which religious meaning and action was understood to reside 
primarily in (relatively fixed) sacred texts, symbols, and ritual 
dramas. »Religion and media« as a field of study has attended instead to 
religious affiliations, sensibilities, and ways of knowing and doing as 
they are found in medias res: in other words, as they are embedded 
within existing social solidarities, power relations, and embodied 
practices of mediation, encompassing the material affordances, 
disciplinary techniques, rules of exchange, and logistical orderings of 
space and time that make diverse forms of religious communication and 
experience possible
 in the first place. However, within this field of study, the agency 
ascribed to »media« remains a matter of considerable confusion. For 
some, media are understood simply as instruments at the disposal of 
religious actors in the service of diverse spiritual and/or theological 
goals; for others, media operate according their own, independent logic, 
imposing new constraints and demands on religious actors who struggle 
for recognition and legitimacy. As a contribution to the larger aims of 
this conference to shed new light on the concept of »practice« within 
media studies, we seek papers that will confront this terminological 
ambiguity.

Section 3: Connecting and Dividing Media Theories: Gender, 
Post_Colonial, and Other Agencies, Moderation: Ulrike Bergermann
Mediated practices of connecting and dividing resonate with senses of 
belonging and desire, negotiating hegemonies, exclusions, subaltern 
people and their im/possible agencies, in moving constellations. Taking 
into account networks and subjects, Cultural, Gender and Postcolonial 
Studies consider the constitutive role of certain ›Others‹ which shape 
our concepts of representation, authenticity, or translation, and look 
at the agencies and performativities of those and those things that were 
said to be non-agents. ›Doing media‹, then, comprises diasporas, 
post_colonies, gendered and racialized subjectivities as places of 
knowledge production. "Situated knowledge" (Haraway) holds true for "the 
knowledge of media" as well, while technologies elicit new temporal 
conceptualizations of precedence and antecedence, including both humans 
and non-humans. The respective connections and divisions will be 
discussed in this section, focusing on the uses of mass media, art, and popu
lar culture, and their Kulturtechniken – and the ways they incite media 
theory.

Section 4: The Current Relationship (After a Longer Non-Relationship) of 
Media Theory and Practice Theory, Moderation: Erhard Schüttpelz
Not long ago, it seems, media theory and practice theory went their 
separate ways. The original ›practice turn‹ in the social sciences 
didn't seem to concern media studies, though it partly originated from 
STS (Schatzki/Knorr Cetina/von Savigny). And some of the seminal topics 
of STS were media topics from the start, like the technological ›systems 
building‹ and in the less obvious guise of laboratory instruments, two 
topics that German media research has continued to investigate. But the 
practice turn in the social sciences originated from questions of 
»social agency« and its socio-technical entanglements – with 
controversial consequences, especially in the ›posthumanist‹ versions of 
practice theory, where the agency of humans and cyborgs is being 
discussed. It took some time for media theory to join this discussion. 
Classical media theory tended to see ›the state of the media‹ as the 
independent variable to be established first, and to treat media pract
ices as »messages«. Research on the ›use‹ of media first appeared to be 
one of the manifestations of this asymmetrical distinction, until such 
research slowly transformed into an all-pervading exercise in symmetry: 
How to derive media from their practices, and how to characterize social 
practices in their contingency on media? And the challenge is here to 
stay: If media theory and practice theory started with their backs to 
one another, how will they proceed in the future? And if we re-assess 
the ›posthumanist‹ trajectory in which social theory and media 
technology first met, does the practice turn itself have a specific 
media historical setting?

We welcome proposals of two pages for all four sections. Your proposal 
should be submitted by December 31, 2014 to Prof Dr. Erhard Schüttpelz 
at 
(schuettpelz /at/ medienwissenschaft.uni-siegen.de)<mailto:(schuettpelz /at/ medienwissenschaft.uni-siegen.de)>. 
In case you are invited to the conference, you will be asked to submit a 
publishable essay (12 pages) for discussion at the conference by May 31, 
2015. This paper should meet two demands: Please characterize at least 
one media practice in all the details necessary for your argument, and 
please propose a theoretical and/or historical question and its possible 
answers.

Symposium - Committee:
Prof. Dr. Ulrike Bergermann (Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig)
Prof. Dr. Monika Dommann (Universität Zürich)
Prof. Dr. Erhard Schüttpelz (Universität Siegen)
Associate Professor Jeremy Stolow (Concordia University)



>
> Symposiumscoordinator and Scientific Assistant
> at the Department of Media Studies, University of Siegen (Germany)



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