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[Commlist] CFA - Media epistemologies: The formal, material, technical, infrastructural, and communicational conditions of knowledge

Fri Nov 17 05:17:22 GMT 2023





*CFA - Media epistemologies: The formal, material, technical, infrastructural, and communicational conditions of knowledge *

Thomas Sutherland (University of Lincoln) and Scott Wark (University of Kent)

We invite abstracts for a thematic stream focusing on *media epistemologies* as part of the inaugural annual Midlands Conference in Critical Thought (MCCT).

An offshoot of the London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT), the MCCT is an annual interdisciplinary conference that provides a forum for emergent critical scholarship, broadly construed. It will be hosted and supported by the Centre for Policy, Citizenship and Society at *Nottingham Trent University* on *April 5th* and *April 6th* *2024*. There is no registration fee for this conference.

The deadline for Paper submissions is *Wednesday December 6th 2023*. Abstracts should be submitted as a word document and should not exceed *500 words*, and should be sent to: (midlandscritical /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(midlandscritical /at/ gmail.com)>.

If you have any questions about this stream, please get in touch by emailing (s.wark /at/ kent.ac.uk) <mailto:(s.wark /at/ kent.ac.uk)>

CFA:

 In ‘Forgetting’ (1981), an often overlooked early essay, Friedrich Kittler claims that theorists and philosophers tend to ‘forget’ the influence that media exert on the knowledge they produce. Though Kittler is specifically commenting on the relation between the apparatus of print-based research – libraries and their systems for sorting and classifying knowledge; the literal tools of scholarship, such as pens and paper, note cards and bookmarks, and, indeed, print publications themselves – this observation has only become more pertinent in our digital age. Today, increasingly complex and increasingly automated media technologies, devices, and platforms are deeply implicated in our epistemologies. They are not passive carriers of information; they play a crucial role in both shaping the formal parameters via which we produce, encounter, and circulate knowledge and also in shaping the critical instruments and methods via which we reflect upon this knowledge. In short, media might not wholly determine how we think, but they inevitably inform how we think with them and about them. In this stream, we wish to solicit varied responses to the question: How are media technologies implicated in knowledge production and circulation? Though we are particularly interested in theoretical and methodological perspectives that consider the possibility that media, by the very fact that they mediate, come already embedded with epistemologies, we are also interested in papers approaching this question from a multitude of different angles:

• To what extent is the constitution of knowledge, as well as its technical support now inextricable from digital media technologies, and how does this alter the very notion of ‘critique’?

• How can we account for the recursive relationship between media theory and media themselves?

• Can we reflect upon the epistemological force of media and the formal or material conditions they impose without being accused of ‘technological determinism’?

• What are the social, cultural, and political implications of our epistemologies being increasingly automated or subjected to techniques of algorithmic sorting, selection, and generation?

• What can we gain from theoretical currents such as media ecology and media archaeology, as well as the various ‘turns’ toward affect, infrastructure, computation, and speculative ontology in addressing these epistemological questions?

• And beyond media theory, what light might other traditions – such as: French epistemology (e.g. Poincaré, Bachelard, Canguilhem, etc.); deconstruction; Foucauldian discourse analysis (with its equation of knowledge and power); feminist social epistemology (emphasizing situated and communitarian knowledge); postcolonial critiques of epistemic violence; new materialism; and ecocriticism (plus the environmental humanities more broadly) – shed on this problem?

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