[Commlist] Call for Abstracts: Meeting of Digital Networks and Activist Cultures

*Call for Abstracts*


*4^th  Meeting of Digital Networks and Activist Cultures (*hosted by the 
Postgraduate Program in Languages, Media, and Arts (LIMIAR) at 
PUC-Campinas, Brazil).


*Deadline: 08/24/20.*

*About t**he event*

*/Redes Digitais e Culturas Ativistas/**[Digital Networks and Activist 
Cultures]* is an event organized by the Postgraduate Program in 
Languages, Media, and Arts (LIMIAR) at PUC-Campinas. Its first edition 
was held in June 2016. The event collaborates with the dialog between 
programs of the university itself and other participants, receiving 
papers from researchers from all over Brazil and also from abroad. From 
an interdisciplinary perspective, this event seeks to promote a plural 
debate among participants, to create opportunities that bring together 
different areas of political, cultural and media knowing/doing.

*4^th  Meeting’s Theme: Boundaries between languages, media, and art*

Amid contemporary identity processes, contact spaces of different 
powerful languages and places are revealed, which are fueled by the 
inconstancy of movement and the need of change. In the 4^th  RDCA 
[acronym for /Redes Digitais e Culturas Ativistas/], the “boundary” 
represents the element that opens up to the (de)structuring 
transformations. Despite the political, cultural, and social turmoil of 
the contemporary world, there may be a force in neighboring spaces to 
proliferate the creation of new ways of being and living. It is in the 
contact between cultures, poetics, media, images, bodies, spaces, 
technologies, and networks, and the interdisciplinarity generated by 
these contacts that we aim to centralize the debates of the discussions 
of this Meeting.

In the crisis of totalizing narratives that have guided the choices of 
individuals for a long time, we seek to look at the border as a place 
where hybridizations take place, which, due to their impurities and 
tensions, carry the place of the strange, the unusual, the different. At 
the borders, we are finding answers to a world in crisis, which rethinks 
itself from truths that are deconstructed at all times, but that at the 
same time can offer alternatives that are being set in artistic, 
communicational, and cultural flows in constant movement.

To think of a changing culture, which is reconfigured from the contact 
with the diversity that is (re)discovered in strategies of visibility 
and recognition. That is the proposal.

The event will take place online on *October 6^th , 7^th , and 8^th , 
2020*. The program includes lectures, round table discussions, an online 
art exhibition and presentation of papers. To guide the attendees, we 
divided the themes into ten working groups (WGs), which are disclosed 
together with the call for papers.

Papers that are accepted and presented during the event will be 
published in a summary notebook.

*Call for abstracts***

The Postgraduate Program in Languages, Media, and Arts from Pontifical 
Catholic University of Campinas invites professors and researchers, at 
undergraduate and graduate levels, to present papers reporting their 
research, experiences or art works focused on the general theme of the 
event: *Boundaries between languages, media, and art.*

*Criteria for papers selection*

Abstracts can be presented in Portuguese, Spanish or English. Shall 
contain a bold title; the name of the author(s), as well as their main 
education and affiliation; sized between 300 and 500 words, Times New 
Roman 11 font, justified, simple paragraph; submit three to five 
keywords; and be sent until *08/24/20* to one of the 10 WGs of interest 
proposed below, organized by teachers from different PPGs and IES.  Note 
that this year we opened a specific WG for undergraduate students 
(WG10). The submission shall be made through the Easychair platform at 
this link <https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rdca2020>. When 
submitting, *choose only one WG*. The paper shall follow the model below:

4RDCA Summary Template 
<https://culturasativistas.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/template-para-resumo-4rdca.docx>Download 
<https://culturasativistas.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/template-para-resumo-4rdca.docx>

The papers are reviewed by the coordinators of the WGs, who are also 
registered on the platform. Each paper is evaluated by at least two 
reviewers. The papers will be judged according to the adherence to the 
event’s theme, the WG’s proposal, the formatting rules, and their 
originality.

The results and the final schedule are published on the website 
http://www.culturasativistas.wordpress.com 
<http://www.culturasativistas.wordpress.com/> on *09/05/20*.

The call for art works is also open. See the instructions in the 
“/Chamada para Exposição Artística RDCA 2020/” [Call for RDCA Art 
Exhibitions 2020] 
<https://culturasativistas.wordpress.com/chamada-para-exposicao-artistica-rdca-2020/> 
tab

*Working Groups (WGs):*

*WG 1 – Corporeality, city, and virtual social media*

There are multiple ways in which corporeality has been reframed in 
relations mediated and located in virtual social medias. These are new 
ways of relating to the world, the Other, and understanding the Self. 
This working group seeks to cover research and reflections on impacts 
and reverberations in the forms of exposure, recognition, identity, and 
the difference in the post-humanism context, whether through the 
artistic management of the bodies, their representations, or 
objectification. What is the body’s place in this context? Urban 
socio-cultural movements, for example, propose other forms of 
sociability that are made possible by virtual social media, causing 
double artistic management of the body, in the network, and the city. 
The extension of this corporeality, as well as its reverberation or 
redefinition, project diachronic and/or synchronic relations which cause 
us to rethink the meaning of the body and the city.

*WG 2 – Crisis and (re)configurations of the media system in 
contemporary democracy*

The recent Brazilian experience of electing a candidate for the 
Presidency of the Republic without friendliness and support from the 
traditional media system is a clear symptom of the reduction in the 
degree of influence of traditional media at the expense of the 
mobilization potential acquired by digital social media in electoral 
processes. The phenomenon points to issues that are sensitive to 
democracy, such as the emergence and proliferation of “fake news”; the 
encouragement of the polarization of extremes, with the resulting loss 
of central territories; the predominance of speeches driven by emotion; 
the merger between public and private in the political field; the new 
roles reserved for traditional media, such as newspapers, TV, and radio; 
the (un)professionalization of politics and the ethical sense of 
electoral campaigns; the levels of voter engagement in representative 
democracy; and the utopian hypothesis of participatory democracy based 
on information and communication technologies in constant development.

*WG 3 – Media, City, and Sociocultural Practices*

Theoretical and methodological reflections, as well as the results of 
empirical works on the city as a locus of cultural processes and its 
relations with the media, compose the universe of reflection and 
academic debate of this working group. The scope of discussion includes 
research that considers the city as a space for the circulation of 
sociocultural practices, that seeks to think about how these phenomena 
delimit space (concrete and imaginary) and condition the generation of 
meanings in urban environments.

*WG 4 – Between (dis)courses: the formation of identities and memory in 
(non) digital times and spaces*

The purpose of this WG is to raise papers that dialogue with the 
processes of memory construction in different space-time contexts, which 
materialize in different discourses, such as those of the media, 
politics, genres, and literature, indicating features of subjectivity 
and the identities that are built in these environments and 
understanding the reading of archives as possibilities of interpretation 
marked by a will for truth and by the networks of power-knowledge. 
Papers that are dedicated to the study of narratives, self-narratives, 
and/or heterotopic spaces that are relevant in the formation of 
identities and modes of subjectivation are some of the focuses of this WG.

*WG 5 – Literacies, languages, technology(ies):  dissension and resistance*

Over the past decade, the way we use the Web has been heavily influenced 
by major technology corporations, such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook. 
As a result, local and autonomous experiences, such as the free-software 
movement, have lost strength in Brazil. Corporations set in motion 
surveillance practices with a huge potential for controlling and 
inducing behaviors, as has been shown by scholars like Shoshana Zuboff, 
Evgeny Morozov, and Sérgio Amadeu, in documentary productions such as 
/Privacidade Hackeada/ [Privacy Hacked], and by activists such as Edward 
Snowden and Julian Assange. If, on the one hand, new forms of 
surveillance, control, and segregation were created in this dynamic, on 
the other hand, the dimension of the transnational connection has 
undeniably been one of the paths in the creation of “escape lines”, as 
suggested by Deleuze and Parnet (1998), and reinscriptions and 
transformations in matters of teaching, learning, ethnicity, 
nationality, race, and class. These conditions occur in the interfaces 
established in the current regime, which includes breaking and creating 
trenches, integration and division, erasure and inclusion, making us 
rethink the production and circulation of languages in the current days. 
Given this, the purpose of this WG is to bring together papers that 
broaden our understanding of both the effects of contemporary forms of 
surveillance and control on subjects, as well as forms of resistance. 
The submitted papers may include different areas, such as language 
education, teacher and student training, and/in their interfaces with 
the arts, communication, and accessibility. Thus, we seek, from a 
critical perspective (Luke, 2019), to discuss the place of different 
literacies in the relations between languages, technologies, and spaces 
for dissension and resistance, in the current days.

*WG 6 – Cyberpolitics and Cyberculture: new times of activism*

The development of Information and Communication Technologies has 
brought deep changes in the dynamics of action and collective 
identities, and the processes of symbolic creation of social actors. 
Addressing the emergence of cultural practices and the expression of 
multiple forms of subjectivities gains an increasingly significant space 
in the studies of digital networks. Remixing practices, file sharing, 
collaborative work, connectivity practices, software production, and 
other topics, manifest the variety of practices built on and by digital 
technologies. The phenomenon of a connected society coexists in a hybrid 
way with old social practices, generating a complex communicational 
ecosystem that produces new forms of sociability. The emergence of this 
paradigm opens space for new possibilities to act in political 
institutions, social movements, and other segments of civil society from 
the creation of spaces for participation and deliberation that emerged 
and continue to emerge in a scenario of time acceleration and social, 
political, and spatial reordering.

*WG 7 – Edges: critical, curatorial, and artistic experiments*

In an era associated with continuous displacements, decomposition, and 
uncertainty, the writing of criticism is activated here as an 
experiment, in an attempt to produce risky situations concerning 
readings of work in transit, borderline, and unstable. As critical 
experiments, we deal with possible paths both for the study of criticism 
and curatorship, as well as for the study of art, poetics, and media 
practices. Based on the theme proposed by the 4^th  Meeting, we observe, 
according to Bochio and Polidoro (2019), that on the one hand, art 
productions since modernity show an overlap of procedures and 
techniques, appropriations, expansion of languages, and hybridisms. On 
the other hand, the popularization of digital technologies and their 
incorporation on a large scale makes their presence happen naturally in 
artistic processes, offering a new look at the strategies used by 
artists and posing new problems for them. We aim to explore, in 
particular, issues related to audiovisual networks, cinema, performance, 
and contemporary art as practices in crisis, crossed by procedures such 
as deconstruction, contamination, and sharing.

*WG 8 – Design and Activist Narratives*

Studies that deal with design as a manifestation and form of expression 
through visual, sound, performance, or object narratives, structured in 
different languages and supports, broadcast in digital media (social 
media and internet). Discusses the potential of different types of 
narratives that promote engagement, awareness, and/or social, political, 
environmental, and cultural change. Papers addressing hybrid and 
interdisciplinary languages, catalysts for multisensory messages with an 
activist and/or dissident impact, produced by individuals or groups, are 
welcome.

*WG 9 – Post-image and visuality technologies*

The contemporary image, between representation and simulation, abandons 
ontological stability to constitute itself in the space-time of network 
interconnections. Among protocols, languages, algorithms, materialities, 
and techniques, the image rejects the reference condition to enhance 
other realities, discursive modes, perceptual experiences. The artistic 
productions that mobilize an amplified notion about the term technology 
matter, not only linked to the computational dimension, through the 
exercise of distension and contamination between historical and 
contemporary processes. Thus, we are interested in discussing the image 
and its technological operations for the poetic constitution.

*WG 10 – Junior Digital Networks and Cultures Activists (undergraduate 
students)*

This working group welcomes the paper of undergraduate students with 
works of scientific initiation, conclusion, extension, or another 
modality that are linked to the event’s theme.


  Contact

To contact the organization, use the email below:

(culturasativistas /at/ gmail.com) <http://gmail.com/>


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