[Commlist] CFP Contested Visibilities (ECREA DCC, GSC and VC sections)

Contested Visibilities: Everyday politics and online imaginaries of the body

co-organised by the Digital Culture and Communication, Gender, Sexuality 
and Communication and Visual Cultures ECREA’s sections and their YECREA 
representatives.



6-8 September 2023, Lusófona University, Lisbon, Portugal


Contested Visibilities: Everyday politics and online imaginaries of the body

While in the early days of the internet, the digital was often seen as 
purely virtual and detached from the experience of human embodiment, our 
current online landscape has challenged this view. Social media seems to 
have awakened the urge to share images of our bodies. These shared 
visual representations contribute to the creation of individual and 
collective identities. They are tools of meaning-making and belonging in 
a highly mediatised world. Their visibility can be part of advertising 
campaigns, everyday interactions, intimate practices, activist 
engagement and many other affective practices. These are situated in 
digital cultures of affect and their inherent normativity is governed 
not only by social norms but also by the particular possibilities and 
algorithmic rules of platforms.


Contested online environments have also become terrain for contemporary 
social justice movements and activists who both respond to and use 
online visual representations for their actions. These hybrid activist 
practices rely on embodied representations and combine online and 
offline activities. While online spaces enable important visibility, 
this visibility also carries risks and raises questions about who 
prefers not to be visible and what practices of resistance can be 
adopted. Digital participation is inextricably linked to embodied 
characteristics (e.g., gender, ethnicity, social class, age, 
(dis)ability or others). These intersecting identities can shape digital 
experiences enabling them to both liberate and oppress individuals and 
communities.


Keynote speakers


  *

    Daniela Jaramillo-Dent | University of Zurich

Daniela Jaramillo-Dent is an internet scholar with research and teaching 
expertise on migration, digital media, and social justice. Her research 
has explored algorithmic (in)visibility, minority representation and 
inequality in digital platforms. She has contributed to and held 
leadership roles in research projects at the local, national and 
European levels. She has international teaching experience in fields 
related to digital inequality, research methods and media literacy and 
has led teaching innovation projects and training workshops for 
innovative teaching in Higher Education.



  *

    Marloes Geboers | University of Amsterdam

Marloes Geboers’ work revolves around the visuality of warfare as 
produced within and through platforms and their fast-evolving 
participatory modalities. Her dissertation focused on platform affective 
affordances and their role in constructing regimes of visibility 
relating to the Syrian war. Alongside these topics, she authored work on 
platform-afforded digital violence aimed at journalists. She blends 
digital methods and automated image analyses in order to study 
performative expressions that replicate, imitate or subvert propaganda 
narratives in more or less tactical ways. These user practices shape and 
are shaped by platform vernaculars that have a profound impact on the 
way we see and experience war within contemporary media ecologies. 
Marloes has a background in political science (MA) and journalism (BA), 
and she has teaching experience in digital methods and the ethics of AI.


Katrin Tiinberg | Tallinn University

Katrin Tiidenberg works at the Baltic Film, Media and Arts School of 
Tallinn University as a Professor of Participatory Culture. Her research 
focuses on the hows and whys of people's social media practices, with a 
particular emphasis on visuality, sex and political participation. The 
overarching questions she tends to ask are about identity, community, 
norms and power. She is currently wrapping up a research project on the 
platformization of sexuality (Rethinking Sexuality) and the role of the 
internet in young people’s political participation (DigiGen) and has 
just started a project on visual digital trust (TRAVIS).


Call for Papers

The conference will include different formats for presentation on topics 
related to contested visibilities, everyday politics and online 
imaginaries of the body. We welcome individual submissions for oral 
presentations, which will be arranged in thematic sessions by the 
organising team. We also welcome submissions in alternative and creative 
formats, proposals may include video, audio, images, text, hyperlinks 
and multimedia that illustrate your reflections in the proposal.


We are interested in abstracts that address the complexity of online 
representations of bodies and/or related visual practices (e.g., 
producing, perceiving, curating, circulating) through case studies, 
theoretical, empirical or methodological approaches. We strongly 
encourage submissions that take an intersectional approach and address 
embodiment in relation to social factors such as gender, sexuality, age, 
class, race/ethnicity, disability, and nationality.


We are open to contributions from scholars at all career stages 
(early-career scholars are especially invited to participate), artists, 
activists, and media producers.


We look forward to submissions on (but not limited to) the following topics:


* The use of digital media for feminist, queer, anti-racist, 
anti-ageist, anti-ableist, anti-classist, neurodiversity, or 
illness-related activism and the returning critique of the normative body;

* Reactionary visualities to the above activism and hate 
speech/imaginaries "against the woke";

* The intertwinement of socio-cultural imaginaries with platform cultures;

* Chances and limits of hybridisation of commercial culture, strategies 
of self-branding and body activism;

* Practical experiments with methods attuned to the 
'online-groundedness' of social body images (e.g., body-image dominated 
platforms such as TikTok or Instagram);

* Impact of online representation of bodies in various fields such as 
sports, memory cultures, advertising, fan/pop cultures, etc;

* Augmented technologies of filtering, avatars and their significance 
for identity and meaning-making;

* Images shared without consent, images that reproduce stereotypes and 
resistance by minority communities;

* Images produced by media and news organisations as part of their work, 
which are ultimately criticised for 'othering'/stereotyping communities, 
and the activism involved;

* Online communities as sites of political pedagogy and critique of 
mainstream/traditional media's stereotyping of the body;

* Dialectical dialogues about the body in the online sphere: 
metadiscourses, beefs, videos about videos, Tiktok reframings;

* Gendered and sexua(lised) digital/online representations of embodied 
diversity, difference and intersectionality;

* Critical analysis of the relationships between digital spheres and 
gendered and sexual(ised) performativity, resistance and defiance;

* Representations of bodies in relation to technology and artificial 
intelligence;


Abstracts

Please submit your proposal (300-500 words) until 15 May, 23:59 (CET) 
using the form at <https://bit.ly/ContestedVisibilities 
<https://bit.ly/ContestedVisibilities>> and highlight how your work 
relates to the conference topic, methods used, and perspectives you 
would like to bring to the discussion. In addition to the thematic 
sessions, the conference will also facilitate practical tutorials 
dedicated to creative/situated/ethical approaches to digital platforms 
and visual data.


Workshop
In addition, our YECREA team offers an online pre-conference workshop 
for early-career scholars focusing on research challenges (ethics, data 
access, collection, analysis etc.) via Zoom on Monday, 4 September 2023. 
This event will offer ECRs the opportunity to present their work in 
progress. If you wish to participate in the ECR pre-conference event, 
please submit an abstract of 200-300 words at 
<https://bit.ly/workshopContestedVisibilities 
<https://bit.ly/workshopContestedVisibilities>>, briefly describing your 
current project and research challenges, e.g. in regard to research 
ethics, data collection, access, or analysis. The accepted participants 
will engage in facilitated peer discussions based on their submissions. 
Participation in the pre-conference YECREA workshop can be independent 
of participation in the conference. Please indicate how you would like 
to participate by 15 May, 23:59 (CET). Participation in the online 
workshop is free of charge.


Fees

The fee includes buffet lunches and tea/coffee breaks during the 
three-day conference.


non-members

	

100€

ECREA members and Lusófona students

	

80€

Early career Researchers

	

60€


Registration opens in early July and will be processed via the 
Eventbrite platform.



Organisation

This ECREA conference is co-organised by the Digital Culture and 
Communication, Gender, Sexuality and Communication and Visual Cultures 
sections and their YECREA representatives.


Hosted and sponsored by Lusófona University.


The conference is partially supported by funding from the European 
Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie 
Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement Nº 101059460.


For questions, please send an email to 
<ContestedVisibilities2023[at]gmail[dot]com>

More info at <https://dccecrea.wordpress.com 
<https://dccecrea.wordpress.com>> and 
<https://www.ecrea.eu/event-5192002?CalendarViewType=1&SelectedDate=9/13/2023 
<https://www.ecrea.eu/event-5192002?CalendarViewType=1&SelectedDate=9/13/2023>>


Important dates


* The deadline for submissions for abstracts is Monday 15 May 2023, 
23:59 (CET).

* We will notify all contributors if their proposal has been accepted or 
not by the end of June.

* Registration for the conference will be open in early July.

* The event will take place on 6-8 September 2023, at Lusófona 
University Lisbon.


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