[ecrea] CFP: Youth Mediations and Affective Relations

Call For Chapters: Youth Mediations and Affective Relations
Susan Driver (York University, Toronto) and Natalie Coulter (York 
University, Toronto) are inviting submissions for a proposed anthology 
exploring the intersections of youth cultures, affective relations and 
digital media.
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of academic and popular 
interest in the ways young people engage with digital media as a 
pervasive and integral part of their everyday lives. On the one hand 
celebratory approaches position youth as generational leaders with 
unique knowledge and skills to operate devices and mobilize 
applications. Alternately young people are positioned in passive ways as 
victims of corporate technological systems that shape their identities 
and delimit their social relations within narrow and normative 
boundaries. In both these framings young people are homogenized and 
fixed within dominant institutions of the digital political economy. Big 
data and overarching structures become primary sites of study losing 
touch with the voices, embodiments and practices of youth within their 
local contexts of learning, creativity and socialization.
Alternatively, to hone in closely on young people has often proven to be 
invasive, bound up with moral evaluations that rigidly interpret the 
subjective and interpersonal lives of young people, negatively judging 
how they connect, play games, make profiles, text each other, upload 
images and gather information. And within this process it is striking 
how much interest gets loosely placed on the emotional and affective 
dimensions of young peoples’ experiences. It is precisely the feelings 
and bodily encounters of young people that grip moral panics about the 
excess and dangers of online interactions: sharing too much information, 
immersing too fast and far within virtual realities, fictionalizing the 
self, taking sexual risks, becoming violent or addicted, and losing 
control. Yet in framing youth experience in terms of affectively charged 
relations that transgress rational and moral codes of meaning, youth are 
once again constructed in universalizing and naturalizing ways. What is 
lacking in this research are expansive critical, empirically detailed 
and ethically nuanced modes of theorizing the links between youth, 
affect and digital mediations.
Scholars have begun to grapple with the affective contours of youth 
mediations using supple and complex interdisciplinary tools that 
recognize the historical and ideological stakes of their practice. Nancy 
Lesko’s deconstructive approach to modern normalizing conceptions of 
youth offers a brilliant starting point to reconsider how youth affect 
gets erased, reified and misrepresented. Feminist approaches to the 
study of girls’ media engagements have been especially responsive to the 
creative emotional and symbolic negotiations of young people across a 
range of media formats (Angela McRobbie, Michelle Fine, Anita Harris, 
Jessica Ringrose, Jessalynn Keller, Anna Hickey-Moody, Emma Renolds). 
Critical attention to youth sexualities have also turned toward the ways 
desire and power play out in a multitude of ways, against restrictive 
heteronormative expectations (Jack Halberstam, Susan Talburt, Whitney 
Monaghan, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Natasha Hurley, Jen Gilbert, Mary 
Louise Rasmussen). Focusing on how racial and national identities and 
embodimentbecome articulated and resisted, scholars have elaborated 
research to considering how and why race matters across media(Tricia 
Rose, Gwendolyn Pough, Greg Dimitriadis, Sunaina Marr Maira, Gayatri 
Gopinath). These lists are in no way exhaustive but what is striking are 
the ways in which thinking through affects of joy, fear, desire, 
anxiety, hope, longing, anger, pleasure and grief (among many others), 
become central to the process of understanding young people’s mediated 
lives across a range of youth scholarship. Recognizing the 
interconnected embodied, affective, psychic, social, cultural, political 
worlds of young people becomes vital within research grappling with 
experiences of marginalization and inequality.
These diverse and overlapping bodies of work are at the forefront of 
attending to the historically mediated and situated dynamics of young 
peoples affective lives and the conceptual mappings and discursive 
formations that make them thinkable and politically relevant. Our book 
aims to expand upon this emerging research, insisting upon theoretical 
applications and speculations that are simultaneously specific and 
historically grounded. Attending to the emerging networked publics and 
social media landscapes that elicit young people’s intense interest, we 
want to address changing intersections of technology, practice, 
representation and affective experiences. We are excited to explore how 
social movements including Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, Arab Spring 
and Occupy have been propelled through the affectively charged and 
nuanced participations that mobilize social movements by, for and about 
young people. We also want to attend to the detailed ways youth use and 
transform media technologies and platforms, at the level of their 
everyday worlds. With the popularity of sharing user-generated content 
on mobile devices through platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat 
and Tumblr, youth are telling stories, imaging themselves and forging 
connections in prolific ways that articulate relations between self and 
other, intimacy and community, creativity and politics that go beyond 
binary ways thinking. We value research that engages with the small data 
realms of young people through which ephemeral and fluid online 
interrelations become noticeable and meaningful, giving rise to new 
interpretive styles and methodologies that refuse totalization and 
closure. Against the often abstract tendencies of affect theory, we aim 
to gather research that is attentive to the changing mediated social 
conditions of the affective relations of young people across gender, 
sexual, racial, national and class differences.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
Affective mediations and globalization/diasporic youth engagements
Young peoples networked sexualities
Gender affect and mediation
Affective dimensions of algorithms/digital surveillance
Affective relations of race/mobilizations of anti-racist youth 
expressions and movements
Moral regulations/panics of young peoples affective relations
Affective formations of young people through platforms/apps/hardware design
Affective life of video games
Mediated embodiments
Neoliberal ideologies and the mediation of youth affect
Commodification/commercialization of affects
Please submit a 500-word abstract that includes a short list of 
references, and a brief bio, by Friday Sept. 15, 2016 to 
(sdriver /at/ yorku.ca) <mailto:(sdriver /at/ yorku.ca)>or (ncoulter /at/ yorku.ca) 
<mailto:(ncoulter /at/ yorku.ca)> .
We will notify successful submissions by Oct 1.Full essays will be due 
by Dec. 1.

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