[Commlist] Graduate Student Conference CFP, "Infrastructure and Abstraction"

First Forum Graduate Student Conference 2024 – Call for Proposals
Division of Cinema and Media Studies
University of Southern California
September 27th and 28th.
Theme: "Infrastructure and Abstraction"

A turn to infrastructure in media studies has drawn attention to 
important lines of inquiry about materiality, environments, elemental 
media, and infrastructures’ frequent entanglements with capitalist and 
colonialist projects. But this turn, at times, also risks occluding no 
less important questions about the work of abstraction in media and 
adjacent considerations of representation, affect, and the ephemeral. 
Such thinking reduces the real to the material and renders abstraction 
immaterial. For instance, Melody Jue’s powerful emphasis on the 
milieu-specificity of thought, which proceeds via a submersion of media 
studies into the ocean, turns on the abjection of abstraction. For her, 
media studies’ usual definition of an interface as a surface forming a 
common boundary between two bodies is unhelpful because abstract, 
referring to nothing in particular, a metaphor stripped “of the 
properties of any particular fluid.” We take Jue’s critique as usefully 
illustrating the epistemological hierarchy operating across interlinked 
turns to matter, environment, elements, and infrastructure. Askance of 
this hierarchy, we begin with the provocation that presumed divisions 
between infrastructure and abstraction, and the values they embed, ought 
not be taken for granted. Rather, such divides issue from specific 
epistemological roots that dictate what the discipline is inclined to 
label “material” versus “immaterial,” “visible” versus “invisible,” 
“tangible” versus “intangible,” “concrete” versus “abstract.”

Decolonial thought writ large is particularly well-positioned to 
re-orient such epistemological underpinnings. Reflecting on Indigenous 
theories of relationality and reciprocity, scholars like Jordan B. 
Kinder characterize kinship with land, water, and the more-than-human as 
infrastructural. Such kinship constitutes a set of material commitments, 
even as colonial thought has historically defined these relational 
networks and accompanying placed-based knowledge systems as “merely” 
spiritual, cultural, and fundamentally intangible. Kinder argues, 
“Infrastructures are better understood as that which mediates between 
and among human and more-than-human worlds.” Meanwhile, Laura Marks 
offers a way to rethink what it is we take to be material and worldly 
versus immaterial and imaginary. Drawing on the writings of the 
16th/17th century Persian philosopher Mullā Ṣadrā, Marks traces an 
alternate history within the development of the Western concept of the 
imagination via the concept of the imaginal, “an audiovisual world that 
is both intangible and more real than matter.” Situated between the 
sensory on the one hand and the intelligible on the other, the imaginal 
is “a radically pro-image concept, affirming the importance of poetry, 
art, and images in motion” including the affective domains of dreams, 
visions, and hallucinations. In this way, the imaginal values the 
worlding powers of abstractions rather than deriding them for their 
immateriality; indeed, it retools our very understanding of what does 
and does not count as material, as well as the value we accord to 
materiality. Kinder expands our sense of what counts as infrastructure; 
Marks offers a way of affirming images as real and worldly; both turn on 
fundamental transvaluations of materiality and immateriality, concretion 
and abstraction. These and other media studies scholars working along 
similar lines demonstrate just some of the ways that the discipline can 
rework the coordinates of infrastructure and abstraction to highly 
generative ends.

The organizing committee of the 2024 First Forum Conference invites 
papers and creative projects from graduate students that navigate 
generative oppositions between infrastructure and abstraction as they 
relate to a wide range of media objects and sites of mediation. We 
encourage submissions that address the unstable borders between these 
two concepts, perhaps at times even reversing their usual connotations. 
Where can infrastructure be described as “abstract,” taking the form of 
social relations, genre patterns, aesthetic modes, etc.? What happens 
when media studies accounts for epistemologies where forms of 
abstraction – storytelling, representation, affective responses, etc. – 
have a particular material or infrastructural quality? What, in short, 
do terms like infrastructure and abstraction do for media studies 
(independently as well as in conjunction with each other), and in what 
ways might the discipline attempt to re-order the ontological 
commitments that saddle the very words “infrastructure” and “abstraction”?

Prospective participants are encouraged to submit abstracts for papers 
or creative projects that playfully yet rigorously examine, interrogate, 
problematize, and/or upend these two polysemous terms. We embrace 
projects that emerge from a wide range of theoretical and methodological 
contexts not just in media studies but within the humanities and social 
sciences more broadly.

Proposal topics may address (but are not limited to):
- Media and the environment; nature as infrastructure
- Media as infrastructures of being/critiques of the same
- Aesthetics, the senses, and the real
- Affect theory and/against representation
- Presence, absence, metaphysics, physics
- Indigenous theories of kinship, relationality, caretaking, and reciprocity
- The Undercommons and infrastructure
- Infrastructures of colonialism and capitalism (invasion, extraction, 
exploitation, settlement, etc.)
- New materialism(s) and historical materialism(s)
- Anti-materialisms
- Abstract versus representational arts; assumed aesthetic hierarchies
- “Alternate” epistemologies/ontologies/ cosmologies
- The public/private divide and infrastructure
- World-building and world-destroying
- Substructures and superstructures
- Strikes, industries, and infrastructural disruption
- Breakdown, glitch, failure, collapse
- Digital environments; interactivity
- Elemental media
- Infrastructure’s promise of futurity
- Indexicality and abstraction
- Abstraction and value
- Vernacular modernism
- Place-based knowledge and abstractions/appropriations thereof

Please submit an abstract (~300 words) and a short biography (~150 
words). Conference presentations will be 15-20 minutes. Applicants must 
submit their materials by July 28, 2024 to 
(firstforumgradconference /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(firstforumgradconference /at/ gmail.com)>. Please include “Name + 
First Forum 2024 Submission” in the subject line. Alongside traditional 
academic papers, we welcome non-traditional projects, including but not 
limited to video essays, short films, and art exhibitions.
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