Posts tagged cultural studies

Book: Media interventions (essay collection)

This collection of essays, the first book-length treatment of its kind, explicates the concept of “media interventions” herein defined as activities and projects that secure, exercise, challenge or acquire media power for tactical and strategic action.

Edited by Kevin Howley w. afterword by Nick Couldry.

Published by Peter Lang, 2013.

MORE – Drawing on insights from media, communication and cultural studies, contributors offer penetrating analyses of media interventions in a variety of social, political, and cultural settings from culture jamming and DIY media, to public relations campaigns and reality television shows. In doing so, the volume develops an analytical framework for examining the complex and contradictory operation of media power in contemporary society.

Read more.

CFP: Internet Memes and Visual Culture (due Jan 15)

This special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture will organize a conversation among cultural scholars, artists, activists, journalists and Internet content producers regarding the social, historical, and aesthetic significance of Internet memes. Our move to “take memes seriously” as communicative and aesthetic objects is especially timely, as memes’ linguistic tropes, visual styles and means of transmission gain increasing visibility beyond their origins in online subcultural spaces such as 4chan or 9gag.

Abstracts due Jan 15, 2013

TOPICS

• how memes figure in a broader history of performative, humor-based, conceptualist, retro, or contemporary digital art practices
• the formal aesthetics of different meme types and the technological infrastructures that undergird them (300x300 macros, supercuts, GIFs, screengrabs, photobombs, snowclones, etc.)
• meme production in non-Western locations (particularly as they may be tied to political risk or Internet censorship)
• meme transmission across national and cultural borders
• how (if?) memes have enabled creative producers (particularly queer people and people of color) to contest presumptions of homogenous Western whiteness on the Internet
• how memes have served as vehicles for political protest and resistance

Read full call (pdf).

New book: Punkademics

A collection of scholarly work on punk featuring essays, interviews, and reprints from notable writers, musicians, visual artists, and emerging talents who actively cut & paste the boundaries between punk culture, politics, and higher education.

Edited by Zack Furness

Available for free at http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=436

Aca-articles: What’s trending in Media & Cultural Studies?

The publisher Routledge is opening access to 30 of their most popular articles on media and cultural studies from journals such as Cultural Trends, Journal of Children and Media and Cultural Studies.

The articles will be available until the end of June 2012 (eh, why lock them once they have been opened up?).

A full table of contents is found in this beautiful pdf: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/explore/mcs-citations.pdf

CFP: Mediated Practice - Insights from STS, Critical Theory and Media Theory (due March 11)

The aim of this EASST panel is to explore how ideas approaches and perspectives might travel more effectively across science and technological studies, media studies and cultural studies.

Abstracts due March 11, 2012.

Joint meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) and the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2012: October 17-20, 2012, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark.

Work in STS, media theory and critical theory intersects through a focus on mediated practices. Furthermore, science and technology studies and humanities based studies of media and culture (including film, art, literature, music) have common interests in representations, meaning systems, social and institutional aspects of science, media and culture, and the politics and ethics of interventions in these domains. We often draw upon overlapping perspectives and theories, which are however deployed in different ways by scholars of science, and scholars of media and culture. The aim of this panel is to build on precedents (Thacker’s Biomedia, van Dijck’s ImagEnation, etc.) and to further explore these overlaps and divergences, and the ways in which concepts, ideas approaches and perspectives might travel more effectively across science and technological studies, media studies and cultural studies.

We invite papers that show how a notion developed in one field can be used in the other, either via analysis of examples, by adopting a hybrid approach, or by theoretical reflection.

Papers for the panel could broach the topics:

• Relations between ideas of medium and technologies in STS and media/critical theory.
• Analyses of visual, textual, and audio objects that use acombined approach from STS and media/critical theory.
• Different ideas of agency (for example, in the context of authors and artists as well as social actors).
• Different understandings of interpretation as an act, practice and process.
• The relation between local and situated meanings on the one hand and general and abstract terms on the other, and issues of circulation of meaning in mediated settings.
• Approaches to contextualised ethics and socio-political responsibility or intervention that draw on STS and media/critical theory.

Please submit your abstract electronically via http://www.4sonline.org/meeting, and make sure to suggest that your paper will fit into open panel no 46: Mediated practices.

The deadline for abstract submissions is March 11.

Panel organisers:
Anne Beaulieu (University of Groninghen)
Annamaria Carusi (University of Oxford / NTNU)
Aud Sissel Hoel (Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU))
Sarah de Rijcke (University of Leiden)

Aca-articles: Digital Memoirs - Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media

Online journal Digital Icons aims to construct a collaborative historical narrative that would define use of digital media, including digital gadgets, digital forms of communication and digital practices, in a post-communist, post-totalitarian space. New issue is out now.

Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media Issue 6. http://www.digitalicons.org/

Issue 6 of Digital Icons explores the concept of transmediality as one of a series of common thematic strands, discusses new digital phenomena and launches a new creative and analytical project, Digital Memoirs. The main objective of Digital memoirs is to facilitate a reflective discussion of the experience of digital media in Russia, Eurasia and Central Europe. Digital Icons aims to construct a collaborative historical narrative that would define use of digital media, including digital gadgets, digital forms of communication and digital practices, in a post-communist, post-totalitarian space. Digital Icons hopes that such a narrative would enhance our understanding of the role of new media in society, contribute to the theory of digital media and avoid the presentism of new media studies by adopting a critical historical perspective. The project straddles practices - creative work and academic reflection; and research disciplines - web anthropology, media studies, communication studies, (literary/art) history, folklore, fandom studies, etc. Digital Memoirs presents diverse voices of cultural authority: the journal publishes submissions of artists, researchers, media practitioners, journalists and people from other professions and walks of life.

Table of contents
6.0 Editorial | Vlad Strukov
6.1 ‘This is your show!’ Mass Creative Practices in Transmedial Projects | Natalia Sokolova
6.2 Stars and Consumers in Contemporary Formats of Media Systems | Alexandra Yatsyk
6.3 Jáchym Topol’s Fictional Statement on the Possibility of Immersive Remembrance | Christine Goelz
6.4 www.snob.ru: A Social Network Site for the Elite | Tine Roesen
6.5 www.openspace.ru: The Faces and Spaces of a Russian Culture-News Portal | Ellen Rutten
6.6 Russian Optimistic Internet TV Channel Dozhd (Interview with Mikhail Zygar’) | Arseny Khitrov
6.7 Digital Memoirs - Our New Project!
6.8 Reports and Commentaries
6.9 Book Reviews

The full issue is available online on http://www.digitalicons.org/.

New Books from Sage on Media, Cultural Studies and Journalism

Symposium: Popular Media Cultures - Writing in the Margins and Reading Between the Lines (London, May ‘12)

This symposium will focus on the cultural work done by media audiences, how they engage with new technologies and how convergence culture impacts on the strategies and activities of popular media fans. It will bring together leading academics in the fields of film, television, fan and cultural studies to open up and take further the debates surrounding popular media, its producers, its audiences, and the cultures in which they are ultimately located.

Symposium: Covent Garden, London Saturday 19th May 2012. Further details of how to register and attend the event will be published in early 2012.

The Centre for Cultural and Creative Research at the University of Portsmouth presents Popular Media Cultures: Writing in the Margins and Reading Between the Lines. A Symposium to be held at the Odeon Cinema, Covent Garden, London Saturday 19th May 2012. Keynote Address by: Prof. Henry Jenkins Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California.

Symposium focus

The first steps toward a wider consideration of popular media cultures surrounding film, television and the Internet, and the relationship between fans and their object of fandom, is to acknowledge the prominent position of what Jonathan Gray calls media paratexts as opposed to the centrality of specific films or television series as the text. Indeed, we are now accustomed in fan studies to state that the productivity of fans and their related fan practices represent an appropriate and worthy text to study just as much as the media text to which they are related or inspired by. So, rather than studying Star Trek as cult text, we might study fan produced videos on YouTube as important texts of fan activity that carry inherent meaning and significance in and of themselves. Or, for example, Star Wars carries with it meaning within and outside the narrative – from an analysis of its mythic story structure using the work of Joseph Campbell to studies of its fans who actively engage in their own meaning making by dressing up, making videos and writing fan fiction. However, the peripheral texts – those associated with the commercialization of the franchise such as the lunchboxes, toys, video games, and websites – are as much part of the meaning making process that they become texts to study in their own right.

Popular Media Cultures seeks to explore the relationship between audiences and media texts, their paratexts and interconnected ephemera, and the related cultural practices that add to and expand the narrative worlds with which fans engage. How audiences make meaning out of established media texts will be discussed in connection with the new texts produced by fans. The symposium will focus on the cultural work done by media audiences, how they engage with new technologies and how convergence culture impacts on the strategies and activities of popular media fans. If, Ken Gelder argues, “Subcultures are brought into being through narration and narrative: told by the participants themselves, as well as by those who document them, monitor them, ‘label’ them, outlaw them, and so on,” then this symposium will pay attention to what media audiences add to a text, what gets written in the margins of a text and what new meanings fans read between the lines. This symposium will bring together leading academics in the fields of film, television, fan and cultural studies to open up and take further the debates surrounding popular media, its producers, its audiences, and the cultures in which they are ultimately located.

Confirmed Speakers:

Dr Stacey Abbott, Reader in Film Studies, Roehampton University. Author of Celluloid Vampires (University of Texas Press, 2007), editor of The Cult TV Book (IB Tauris, 2010), co-author of Falling in Love Again (IB Tauris, 2009), and series editor of Investigating Cult TV for IB Tauris.

Dr Will Brooker, Reader and Director of Research, Kingston University. Author of Using the Force (Continuum, 2002), Hunting the Dark Knight (IB Tauris, 2012) and editor of The Blade Runner Experience (Wallflower, 2005).

Dr Joanne Garde-Hansen, Principal Lecturer in Media and Director of the Research Centre of Media, Memory and Community, University of Gloucestershire. Author of Media and Memory (Edinburgh UP, 2011), co-editor of Save As… Digital Memories (Palgrave, 2009) and co-author of the forthcoming Emotion Online: Theorising Affect on the Internet (Palgrave).

Dr Kristyn Gorton, Senior Lecturer in Television Studies, University of York. Author of Media Audiences (Edinburgh UP, 2009) and co-author of the forthcoming Emotion Online: Theorising Affect on the Internet (Palgrave).

Dr Matt Hills, Reader in Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University. Author of Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002), The Pleasures of Horror (Continuum, 2005) and Triumph of a Time Lord (IB Tauris, 2010).

Prof. Mark Jancovich, Professor of Film and Television, University of East Anglia. Author of Rational Fears (MUP, 1996) and The Place of the Audience (BFI, 2003) and co-editor of Defining Cult Movies (MUP, 2003), Quality Popular Television (BFI, 2003), and Film and Comic Books (Mississippi UP, 2007).

Prof. Roberta E. Pearson, Professor of Film and Television, University of Nottingham. Author of Eloquent Gestures (University of California Press, 1992), co-editor of Cult Television (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), The Many Lives of Batman (Routledge, 1991), and editor of Reading Lost (IB Tauris, 2009).

New Book: The Mobile Audience - Media Art and Mobile Technologies

The convergence of mobile technologies and ubiquitous computing is creating a world where information-rich environments may be mapped directly onto urban topologies. This book tracks the history and genesis of locative and wearable media and the ground-breaking work of pioneer artists in the field.

Editor: Martin Rieser

View this book on Amazon.

The Mobile Audience: Media Art and Mobile Technologies examines changing concepts of space and place for a wide range of traditional disciplines ranging from Anthropology, Sociology, Fine Art and Architecture to Cultural and Media Studies, Fashion and Graphic design. Mobile and Pervasive media are beginning to proliferate in the landscape of computer mediated interaction in public space through the emergence of smartphone technologies such as the iPhone, cloud computing extended wifi services and the semantic web in cities.

These dispersed forms of interaction raise a whole series of questions on the nature of narrative and communication, particularly in relation to an audience’s new modes of mobile participation and reception. These issues are explored through a series of focused essays by leading theorists, seminal case studies and practitioner interviews with artists at the cutting edge of these technologies, who are extending the potential of the medium to enhance and critique technological culture. By emphasizing the role of the audience in this nomadic environment, the collection traces the history and development of ‘ambulant’ artistic practice in this new domain, creating an essential handbook for those wishing to understand the dominant global technology of the 21st Century and its implications for Art, Culture and Audience.

Table of Contents

- Howard Rheingold: Introduction
- Martin Rieser: Overview

Section 1: Towards Hybridity. A History of Audience Mobility

• Erkki Huhtamo: Pockets of Plenty: An Archaeology of Mobile Media
• Susanne Jaschko: The Temporal and Spatial Design of Video and Film-based Installation Art in the 60s and 70s: Their Inherent Perception Processes and Effects on the Perceivers’ Actions
• Martin Rieser: Forgotten Histories of Interactive Space
• Adriana de Souza e Silva: Art by Telephone: From Static to Mobile Interfaces

Section 2: Critical Issues in Mobile Art

Critical Contexts and Definitions

• Mary Griffiths and Sean Cubitt: Mobile/Audience: Thinking the Contradictions
• Jon Dovey and Constance Fleuriot: Towards a Language of Mobile Media
• Beryl Graham: Snapshots from Curating Mobility

Understanding Public Spatialisation

• Martin Rieser: Beyond Mapping: New Strategies for Meaning in Locative Artworks
• Anke Jacob: Digital Media and Architecture—An Observation
• Mirjam Struppek: Urban Screens as the Visualization Zone of the City’s Invisible - Communication Sphere

The Creative User

• Debbi Lander: Future Physical: The Creative User and theme of response-ABILITY
• Andrea Zapp: ‘A Fracture in Reality’: Networked Narratives as Imaginary Fields of Action and Dislocation

Section 3: Case Studies

Locative Art

• Josephine Reid and Richard Hull: What Makes Mediascapes Compelling?
• Valentina Nisi, Glorianna Davenport/Valentina Nisi, Mads Haahr and Glorianna Davenport: Hopstory/Media Tales of the Liberties
• Drew Hemment, John Evans, Mika Raento and Theo Humphries: Loca: ‘Location Oriented Critical Arts’
• Usman Haque: Invisible Topographies
• Jonah Brucker-Cohen: Wifi-Hog: The Battle for Ownership in Public Wireless Space

The Creative User: The User as Co-creator

• Paul Sermon: Puppeteers, Performers or Avatars: A Perceptual Difference in Telematic Space
• Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau: Mobile Feelings: Wireless Communication of Heartbeat and Breath for Mobile Art
• Victoria Fang: The Living Room
• Arianna Bassoli: tunA and the Power of Proximity
• Margot Jacobs: Engagement with the Everyday
• Cati Vaucelle: Between Improvisation and Publication: Supporting the Creative Metamorphosis with Technology
• Anthony Rowe: Developing Creative Audience Interaction: Four Projects by Squidsoup

Wearable Computing

• Lisa Stead, Petar Goulev, Caroline Evans and Ebrahim Mamdani: The Emotional Wardrobe
• Katherine Moriwaki: Social Fashioning and Active Conduits
• Laura Beloff: Wunderkammer: Wearables as an Artistic Strategy

Section 4: Artist Interviews

Locative

• Fiona Raby: Flirt and Mset
• Teri Rueb: Trace, The Choreography of Everyday Movement and Drift
• Matt Adams: Blast Theory
• Steve Benford: Mixed Reality Lab
• Drew Hemment: The Politics of Mobility

Wearables

• Joey Berzowska: Memory-Rich Garments and Social Interaction
• Annie Lovejoy: Heart on Your Sleeve
• Contributor Biographies

Glossary
Selected Bibliography

Aca-book: Digital Futures for Cultural and Media Studies

This book is an ambitious rendering of the digital future from a pioneer of media and cultural studies, a wise and witty take on a changing field, and our orientation to it.

The author:

• Investigates the uses of multimedia by creative and productive citizen-consumers to provide new theories of communication that accommodate social media, participatory action, and user-creativity
• Leads the way for new interdisciplinary engagement with systems thinking, complexity and evolutionary sciences, and the convergence of cultural and economic values
• Analyzes the historical uses of multimedia from print, through broadcasting to the internet
• Combines conceptual innovation with historical erudition to present a high-level synthesis of ideas and detailed analysis of emergent forms and practices
• Features an international focus and global reach to provide a basis for students and researchers seeking broader perspectives

Digital Futures for Cultural and Media Studies
John Hartley
ISBN: 978-0-470-67100-9
256 pages
February 2012, Wiley-Blackwell

By John Hartley, Research Director of the Centre for Creative Industries & Innovation at Queensland University of Technology, Australia, where he was founding dean of the Creative Industries Faculty. Previously he was head of the School of Journalism, Media & Cultural Studies at Cardiff University in Wales. Hartley is author of many books on popular culture, media, journalism and creative industries. His previous books with Wiley-Blackwell include Television Truths (2008), Story Circle: Digital Storytelling Around the World (co-edited with Kelly McWilliam, 2009), and Creative Industries (2005).

View a preview of this book on Google Books or purchase from Wiley.