[ecrea] CFP: Beyond Backlash: Remediating 1980s Activisms

*Proposal for Special Issue of **/Continuum: Journal of Media and 
Cultural Studies/*
**
*Thinking Beyond Backlash: Remediating 1980s Activisms*
**
*Co-Edited by Elizabeth Groeneveld and Samantha C. Thrift*
**
For this special issue of /Continuum/, the co-editors invite 
contributions that generate new ways of thinking about social and 
political activism of the 1980s through the critical lens of 
“remediation.” In common parlance, the practice of remediation refers to 
the act of providing a remedy. Cultural memory scholars have extended 
this definition to refer to the transcription of “memory matter”—that 
is, the images and narratives of the past—across different media (Erll 
2011, 141; Erll and Rigney 2009). Similarly, new media scholar Leah 
Lievrouw (2011) expands on Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s (1999) 
definition of remediation as the representation of one medium in 
another. For Lievrouw, remediation describes a transformative media 
practice; a process that “borrows, modifies, samples, and remixes 
existing content, forms and expressions to create new works, 
relationships,interactions and meanings” (2011, 219). To examine 
activist media practices through the lens of remediation means 
emphasizing people’s reconfiguration of media technologies to advance 
social justice agendas. As an approach to social movement histories, 
remediation is political work.
In returning to the recent past of the 1980s, this special issue turns 
attention to a decade that has hitherto been neglected within many 
social movement histories, in ways that arguably elide particular kinds 
of events and bodies. The 1980s have been identified as a fallow period 
within many social movement histories, or even a decade marked by an 
intensified “backlash” against these movements (Faludi 1991; Gamson 
1995, 393; Hughey 2013, 722). Often, the 1980s are dismissed as an era 
marked /only /by increasing conservatism and an intensification of 
neoliberalism. And yet, those years provided the context for intense 
queer, feminist, and indigenous and Black civil rights activisms with 
enduring legacies identifiable in contemporary movements and activist 
practices.
To this end, “Thinking Beyond Backlash” will bring together scholarship 
that aims to remediate activist praxis of the 1980s, so as to cultivate 
more nuanced understandings of the ways activism proliferates 
under/alongside/because of neoliberalism and to render its connection(s) 
to contemporary mobilizations perceptible. Remediation offers a 
versatile and creative framework for “unsettling” ways of thinking and 
writing about social movement histories (Ávilo 2014). In recent years, 
scholars have called for more the development of new, innovative, and 
more complex ways of writing about social movement histories 
(Agathangelou and Killian 2016; Davis 2002; Scott 2011). We see the 
practice of remediation as an approach that productively responds to 
this call, by enabling the generation and configuration of new memories 
of the 1980s – a practice that speaks to Victoria Hesford’s argument for 
“less limiting and more surprising articulations of our attachments and 
disattachments” to unsettling historical events (2013, 211). 
Contributions to this special issue will thus develop Cultural Studies 
theorizing on remediation, grounding this work in a social justice 
framework that recognizes the ways in which looking critically to 
activist practices, strategies, and artifacts of the “past” can generate 
new tools for our contemporary moment.
In revisiting the activist media, practice and organizing of the 1980s, 
this special issue not only calls attention to and reinvigorates 
conversation about this era, but also opens up a larger critical debate 
on how remediation might challenge the “decadisation” of social movement 
histories more broadly. In this sense, contributions to the special 
issue will move productively between the conceptual and the applied, 
advancing Cultural Studies understandings of remediation, memory, 
temporality, and social change, and cultivating histories of social 
activism attentive to the conditions for mobilization in the 1980s.

Interested contributors should send a 250-300 word abstract for a 
proposed article, and a short bio, to (egroenev /at/ odu.edu) and 
(samantha.thrift /at/ ucalgary.ca) by *Friday, October 14*.

We project that unpublished full-length academic articles of 
approximately 6,000 words will be required by April 1, 2017. The 
anticipated publication date for the Special Issue will be mid-2018.

*References*

Agathangelou, Anna M., and Kyle D. Killian, eds. 2016. /Time, 
Temporality, and Violence /

/            in International Relations: De(fatalizing) the Present, 
Forging Radical /

/            Alternatives/. New York: Routledge.

Ávilo, Eliana de Souza. 2014. “Decolonizing Straight Temporality Through 
Genre

              Trouble in Edwidge Danticat’s /The Farming of Bones/.” 
/Ilha do Desterro /67: 21-

              34.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. 1999. /Remediation: Understanding 
New Media./

              Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Davis, Joseph E., ed. 2002. /Stories of Change: Narrative and Social 
Movements/. State

              University of New York Press.

Erll, Astrid. 2011. /Memory in Culture./ Trans. Sara B. Young. New York: 
Palgrave

Macmillan.

Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney, eds. 2009. /Mediation, Remediation and the 
Dynamics of /

/            Cultural Memory/. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Faludi, Susan. 1991. /Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American 
Women/. New

              York: Crown.

Gamson, Joshua. 1995. “Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer 
Dilemma.”

/Social Problems /42(3): 390-407.

Hesford, Victoria. 2013. /Feeling Women’s Liberation/. Durham, NC: Duke 
University

              Press.

Hughey, Matthew W. 2013. “White Backlash in the ‘Post-Racial’ United 
States.” /Ethnic /

/            and Racial Studies /37(5): 721-30.

Lievrouw, Leah A. 2011. /Alternative and Activist New Media./ Cambridge: 
Polity Press.

Scott, Joan Wallach. 2011. /The Fantasy of Feminist History/. Durham, 
NC: Duke

              University Press.**

**
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