With forthcoming conferences in Leeds (Communication and the City) and Helsinki (The Spectacular/Contested/Ordinary Media City), not to mention the special Media and Urban Life (PDF) track in which I recently presented at the Urban Affairs Association conference, it’s been a very busy year for all things media and cities. Now, we can add yet another interesting-looking conference, Mediating Cityscapes, which will take place this September 2013 in The Hague. What distinguishes this conference is that is will be held during the annual arts festival Two Days Art. The call for papers is pasted below.

MEDIATING CITYSCAPES

Den Haag/The Hague

27-28 September, 2013

If urban space has historically been defined by the relation between static structures and mobile subjects, this dichotomy is fast giving way to hybrid spatialities characterized by dynamic flows which not only dissolve the fixity of traditional modes of spatial enclosure, but problematize the unified presence of the subject traversing their contours. Scott McQuire, The Media City (2008)

As Scott McQuire suggests, the contemporary city is marked by a number of tensions found between fixity and flow and the resulting hybrid spatialities which are shaped by a multifarious range of mediations. Historically, certain of these mediations, such as film, photography, music, art, and more recently, mobile and locative media, have helped shape the diverse strata which compose both the material and immaterial dimensions of the contemporary city. In form, and as practices and discourses, they have also afforded opportunities to critically engage with and creatively intervene in the city. As part of the annual arts festival Two Days Art, held in Den Haag, this interdisciplinary symposium will focus on creative and artistic responses to the mediated cityscape. We encourage papers and submissions from academics, artists and practitioners that consider the multiple ways in which various media (film, music, photographic, digital, etc.), creative practices, and technologies put in to play a diverse array of encounters and interfaces that engage with, interrupt, reconstitute, or resist the hybrid spatialities which define the contemporary cityscape.

Abstracts of no longer than 250 words can be sent to: geoff.stahl@vuw.ac.nz

Closing Date: Friday, June 14th 2013.

Participants will be notified by July 1st, 2013.
More on Two Days Art here: http://todaysart.org

Since initially announcing the ICA preconference Conditions of Mediation, Tim Markham and I have been pleasantly surprised by the interest it has seemed to generate. Now that the deadline for abstract submissions has passed, this pleasant surprise has been matched by an overwhelming number of submitted paper proposals. A difficult task awaits, looking through all those paper proposals. But I think we look forward to it: a good insight into the range of phenomenological (and related) thinking out there on media, technology and communication.

We will be getting back to all who submitted abstracts no later than 20 December 2012 with a decision.

A reminder that the abstract submission deadline for Conditions of Mediation, the ICA Philosophy, Theory and Critiqe preconference I am organizing with Tim Markham, is next week, by the end of the day 20 November 2012. For more details see this blog post over on the preconference website.

It’s been in the works for a while, but I’m now happy to announce that, in collaboration with my Birkbeck colleague Tim Markham, we will be holding Conditions of Mediation: Phenomenological Approaches to Media, Technology and Communication on 17 June 2012 at Birkbeck, University of London. The event is a preconference sponsored by the Philosophy, Theory and Critique section of the International Communication Association (ICA), and will take place immediately prior to the ICA’s 2013 Annual Conference.

The pre-conference will feature two plenaries of keynote speakers, as well as four-to-six panels of paper presentations selected from submissions of abstracts.

We confirmed, we think, a great lineup of keynote speakers, including David Berry, Nick Couldry, Graham Harman, Lisa Parks and Paddy Scannell.

For further details on the conference themes, venue, registration, paper proposal submission and keynotes, visit the conference website – and don’t forget to ‘like’ us on our Facebook page!

In quite a short space of time, there seems to have been a remarkable renewal of interest in media technologies, and in particular in the ‘materiality’ of media. Points of reference vary, but media archaeology, medium theory, digital humanities, science and technology studies, and object-oriented philosophy have all recently been prominent points of reference.

In this rubric, communication +1, a new open-access journal, has entered the fray with a call for papers on ‘communication and new materialism’. I’ve pasted the call below.

CFP – Communication and New Materialism

communication +1 invites submissions for its upcoming issue, Communication and New Materialism.

Given the recent emergence of new perspectives in critical theories, such as Object-Oriented Ontology, Speculative Realism, Alien Phenomenology, Flat Ontology, and associated research programs, this issue seeks to explore the implications of these perspectives for the study of communication and media. We use the term, New Materialism, broadly to include all the aforementioned as well as other related perspectives in the hope to be as inclusive as possible and to encourage diverse voices and analytic angles that focus on the forms and processes of mediation across different fields. We are particularly interested in works that engage with the theoretical underpinnings of New Materialism to challenge the text-centered approaches in media and communication studies.

Please submit short proposals of no more than 500 words by December 7th, 2012 to communicationplusone@gmail.com.

Upon invitation, full text submissions will be due April 5th, 2013, with expected publication in July, 2013.

UPDATE: The editors of TOPIA have been in touch (how very thorough of them!) and noted a correction – the number for this special issue is TOPIA 28.

Original post:
TOPIA, the Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies has released a call for papers seeking to tackle recent debates on the future of the university, from various cultural studies perspectives. As the CFP rightly indicates, recent events in the UK, Italy, California, Biritsh Columbia, Quebec and beyond have provoked questions not only about how universities should be funded, or even whether or not they should be ‘public’, but more foundationally, how we might determine just what sort of entities universities might or should be (for an interesting overview, see Craig Calhoun’s keynote lecture at the Open University’s Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance last year). There CFP does not appear to be online, so I will post it in full below for those interested in submitting a paper. [Update: the CFP is now online on the TOPIA website]

CALL FOR PAPERS

‘Out of the Ruins: The University to Come’

Guest Editors: Bob Hanke (York University) and Alison Hearn (University of Western Ontario)

TOPIA 2728, Fall 2012

This special issue of TOPIA seeks contributions (articles, offerings, review essays and book reviews) that reflect on the contemporary university and its discontents. Fifteen years after the publication of Bill Readings’ seminal book The University in Ruins and in the wake of the UK government’s new austerity budget, Nick Couldry and Angela McRobbie proclaim the death of the English university. In Italy students demonstrating against the Bologna Process protect themselves from police with giant books. On the heels of severe budget cuts and increasing privatization in the California state system, protesting students occupy university buildings, while in British Columbia and Quebec hundreds of students gather for rallies against spiraling student debt and increasing corporate influence on campus. Everywhere university systems are being eviscerated by neoliberal logics asserting themselves even in the face of economic recession. After decades of chronic under-funding and restructuring, public universities have ceded the university’s public role in a democracy and embraced “academic capitalism” as a “moral” obligation. Acting as venture capitalists, they pressure academics to transfer and mobilize knowledge and encourage research partnerships with private interests; acting as real estate developers, they take over neighbourhoods with callous disregard for established communities; acting as military contractors, they produce telecommunications software and light armoured vehicles for foreign governments; acting as brand managers, they open branch plant campuses around the world and compete for foreign students who can be charged exorbitant fees for access to a “first world” education. With tuition fees and student debt on the rise, academic labour is tiered, cheapened and divided against itself; two-thirds of classes in U.S. colleges and universities are taught by faculty employed on insecure, non tenure-track contracts. The casualization of academic labour and a plea for sustainable academic livelihoods were at the core of the longest strike in English Canadian university history. As collegiality, academic freedom, and self-governance recede from view, the university remains a terrain of adaptation and struggle.

We will need all the conceptual tools that cultural studies can muster to analyze the changing university as the foundation for our academic callings and scholarly practices. In addition to external influences such as globalization, technoscience, corporatization, mediatization, and higher education policy, internal managerial initiatives, bureaucratization, deprofessionalization, structural complicity between administration and faculty, and intellectual subjectivities must also be analyzed. All of us, no matter what our political position, must take the time to reflect on the broad questions raised by these changes. Is the site of the university worth struggling over or re-imagining? Can the neoliberal university be set against itself? Is it time for reform or exodus? What other practices of knowledge production, interpretations, modes of organization, and assemblages are possible? This special issue is designed to reflect upon, analyze and strategize about the past, present and future of the university.

In addition to these matters of concern, possible topics to further dialogue and enable further study include but are not limited to:

• analyzing and assessing the crisis of the public university
• implementing globalizations: theory, rhetoric and historical experience
• continuity and transformation in national academic cultures
• the position and role of the arts, humanities and social sciences
• university leaders and university making
• managerial theory/practice, academic ethics, and the symbolism of university finance
• university-private sector intermediaries and initiatives; “innovation” and “creativity” as alibis for academic capitalism; knowledge “transfer” and “mobilization”
• marketing, media relations and the promotional condition of the university
• space, time, speed and rhythm in the network university
• the professor-entrepreneur, research practice, and the imperative to produce
• academic labour, tenure, stratification and precarity
• faculty governance, unions and institutional democracy
• the indebted, student-worker and the decline of academic study
• scholarly disciplines and territories, infrastructure, information practices, communication and publishing
• the scholarly community of money: grant agencies, writing, committees and adjudication
• media/cultural production and critical/radical pedagogy
• the development of knowledge cultures and the expansion of the commons
• the university in relation to nearby communities and wider social movements
• resistance, common and counter-knowledge, alternative educational formations
• remaking the public university in Canada and in other national contexts

Submissions

To view the author guidelines, see http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/about/submissions#authorGuidelines.

To submit papers (with titles, abstracts and keywords) and supplementary media files online, you need to register and login to the TOPIA website at http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/user/register.

The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2012. Peer review and notification of acceptance will be completed by May 15, 2012. Final manuscripts accepted for publication will be due July 5, 2012. Comments and queries can be sent to Bob Hanke bhanke@yorku.ca or Alison Hearn ahearn2@uwo.ca.