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

*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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