[ecrea] Special Issue of Cultural Studies <=>Critical Methodologies on Transparency

*Special Issue of Cultural Studies <=>Critical Methodologies on 
Transparency*

We invite contributions for a special issue of Cultural Studies <=> 
Critical Methodologies on transparency. The issue will be edited by Jan 
Teurlings and Markus Stauff, both lecturers at the Department of Media 
Studies at the University of Amsterdam.

The continuing Wikileaks saga is but one example of the pervasive 
contemporary trend towards and struggle around /transparency./ Not only 
politics, but Western (media) culture at large seems permeated by a 
tendency towards transparency. DVDs routinely include a commentary on 
how the movie was produced, reality TV makes no secret of its contrived 
artificiality and invites for savvy readings, political commentary 
focuses on the inner workings of government, sports reporting routinely 
reports on transfer information and the amounts involved, or goes to 
great lengths to explain and visualize team strategies, and trendy 
restaurants integrate in the kitchen from the dining area. Situationists 
like Debord argued in the 1960s that we were living in the society of 
the spectacle; nowadays, it seems, that spectacle has become 
translucent, or that the machinery producing the spectacle has become an 
integral part of the latter.

It is not only in the sphere of media that transparency has taken center 
stage. In politics, policy studies and economics the question of 
transparency has a long history. The often unspoken assumption is that 
transparency is somehow "good" and secrecy or black-boxing is "bad". In 
this special issue we want to rise above this binary opposition and 
instead interrogate transparency's relation to a variety of political 
traditions, like (neo)liberalism, social-democracy, communism, anarchism 
or conservatism.

We are also interested in the question what kinds of knowledge are 
promoted by a particular "transparent" medium, genre or cultural form, 
and what types of subjectivities it stimulates. The work of Foucault is 
an obvious theoretical resource for answering such questions but we 
specifically encourage engagements with other theoretical approaches, 
like marxism, feminism, postcolonial theory or actor-network theory.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

- media sports and transparency

- visualization and forms of knowledge

- new media, new transparencies?

- the limitations and impossibility of transparency

- transparency and risk society

- transparency and statistics

- transparency and the culture of auditing

- transparency and conspiracy theories

- the political economy of transparency

- gendered forms of transparency

- the transparency of globalization/ the globalization of transparency

- transparency and ideology / transparency as ideology

- transparency as governmentality / governmentality and transparency

- transparency and liberalism

- transparency and the control society

- transparency and full spectrum dominance

Articles on particular case-studies, like Wikileaks, Abu Ghraib, Google 
Analytics, or Transparency International are also solicited.

Authors can choose between two formats: full-length (6000 words, notes 
not included), or the above-mentioned case studies of 2500-3000 words.

If you are interested in contributing, please send a 300 word abstract 
before 15 February 2012 to Jan Teurlings, (j.a.teurlings /at/ uva.nl) 
<mailto:(j.a.teurlings /at/ uva.nl)>, mentioning whether your contribution is a 
full-length article or a case study. The deadline for finished papers is 
1st of May 2012.








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Nico Carpentier Reifova
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NEW BOOK:
Media and Participation. A site of ideological-democratic struggle
(Intellect, 2011, 409p.)
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=4744/
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Loughborough / Leicestershire LE11 3TU / UK
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MA in Media and Cultural Analysis&  the
MA in Global Media and Cultural Industries @
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ss/pg-taught/documents/MCCebrochure.pdf
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Centre for Studies on Media and Culture (CeMeSO)
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European Communication Research and Education Association
Web: http://www.ecrea.eu
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E-mail: (n.carpentier /at/ lboro.ac.uk)
Web: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
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