[ecrea] CfP: Cultural Critique - Re-negotiating authority in contemporary media culture

  CfP – special issue of MedieKultur:


  Cultural Critique - Re-negotiating authority in contemporary media 
culture

This call invites article proposals on cultural critique in contemporary 
media culture. Interconnected media institutional and technological 
developments have during the past two decades enabled advanced public 
participation in cultural debate, but also challenged intellectual 
authority, enlightenment and expertise. Today cultural critique stems 
not only from traditional critical institutions such as academia and the 
news media, associated with intellectual and public authority. Culture 
critical authority is constantly performed and (re)negotiated in various 
types of digital media by bloggers, celebrities, intellectuals, pundits, 
radio and TV hosts as well as amateur reviewers. Processes of 
digitalization, commercialization and professionalization in the media 
industries have thus blurred the boundaries of what is ‘cultural 
critique’ and who may be labeled ‘a cultural critic’?

At least four interconnected features have challenged the established 
critical institutions:

1) The media’s favoring of cultural generalists at the expense of 
specialists with ‘critics’ without an aesthetic knowledge entering the 
culture critical scene, potentially marginalizing academically grounded, 
cultural critique and art reviewing

2) Amateurs and their increasing participation in cultural debate from a 
bottom-up or more subjective and experienced-based perspective by means 
of digital media platforms, i.e., agents residing outside 
institutionalized frameworks, performing popular expertise

3) Celebrity culture’s ubiquity in view of visibility, renown and fame 
increasingly equaling authority and suggesting that fame and authority 
in one sphere can be translated into influence in other spheres

4) Social media’s blurring of the boundaries between the public and 
private, challenging conceptions of when and how cultural critics 
perform as professionals and when they provide more private judgments of 
taste or statements

These features point to the necessity of more thoroughly investigating 
the current reconfigurations of cultural critical authority and 
expertise /in/ (digital) media and /by means of/ (digital) media. Hence, 
this special issue of /Mediekultur/ aims to address the shifting 
relations between specialists/generalists, professionals/amateurs, 
producers/users, public/private in cultural critique; how these shifts 
put the traditional authority and self-understanding of the cultural 
critic to the test; and how media visibility, media capital or celebrity 
capital have become pivotal for gaining a critical voice.

We welcome both theoretically and/or empirically focused contributions 
that address the following topics and questions (but not exclusively):

  * How can we conceptualize ‘cultural critique’ in contemporary media
    culture?
  * How does the increasing heterogeneity of cultural arbiters of taste
    in contemporary media influence and transform the production, form
    and content of cultural critique?
  * How do digital media (e.g., blogs/vlogs, Twitter, Instagram)
    influence, reproduce, challenge and transform cultural critique and
    its established genre conventions?
  * Which media historical and -structural changes have occasioned the
    contemporary heterogeneity of cultural critics in the media, and how
    do media systemic and/or, national/cross-national cultural
    perspectives play into this?
  * What are the interplay of celebrity culture and cultural critique in
    regard to, for example, journalists’ self-branding,
    micro-celebrities and amateur critics, the cultural critic as a
    celebrity/the celebrity as cultural critic?
  * How can we understand changing notions of authority and expertise in
    cultural critique and/or conceptualize cultural authority and media
    visibility?
  * What is the role and/or interplay of various types of (digital)
    media in producing and reproducing cultural critics?

*Guest editors *(to whom abstracts should be submitted)*:*

Helle Kannik Haastrup (h.k.haastrup /at/ hum.ku.dk) 
<mailto:(h.k.haastrup /at/ hum.ku.dk)> (University of Copenhagen, Dept. of 
Nordic Studies) &

Nete Nørgaard Kristensen (netenk /at/ hum.ku.dk) <mailto:(netenk /at/ hum.ku.dk)> 
(University of Copenhagen, Dept. of Media, Cognition and Communication)

*Deadlines:*

  * Submission of abstracts (300 words max): June 12 2017
  * Invitation to submit full articles: July 1 2017
  * Submission of articles: February 1 2018
  * Publication: November/December 2018

**

*Practical information: *

The open call invites proposals in both English and the Scandinavian 
languages.

See call for papers: 
http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/mediekultur/announcement/view/505





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