*CFP* "HUMANISM AND THE FICTIONAL REPRESENTARIONS OF MONARCHS IN LITERATURE, ARTS AND MEDIA", BOOK CHAPTER

When Gilgamesh rejected the advances of Ishtar and refused to do what his father did, he renounced the status of the chosen lover and champion of the Goddess and (unwittingly) decided to be human. The death of Enkido made him realize that he is no longer favored by the Gods. His failed attempt to reach immortality can be read as an attempt to regain the former status he renounced. The epic of Gilgamesh, like other epics, anounces the severing of the connection between the divine and the human in the political realm. After Gilgamesh, the biographies of Mesopotamian rulers started to seem more human despite the formulaic presence of the divine. In ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, Monarchs were either gods or descendents of gods. In the Medieval age, he devine right of kings replaced the old myths about the divine lineage of monarchs. Machiavelli's realpolitiks and the advent of Renaissance humanism put the concept of divine right in question. The human rather than the divine started to define the monarchs in the West. In the East, however, while Europe was restricting its monarchs, the Meiji restoration puts the emperor at the center of the political system in Japan. The Victorian and Edwardian ages are the last literary periods to be named after monarchs. They both witnessed the rise of Gothic literature. The figure of Dracula strikes the reader as a monarchic figure. But this monarch is a posthuman figure cursed with immortality and a hunger for human blood. In recent years, the gothic and horror genres have gained remarkable popularity in cinema and popular culture. The figures of the Mummy and the vampire are usually depicted as monarchic figures that seek revenge for past wrongs. Revenge is closely related to the theme of royalty. In classical and Renaissance, modern and contemporary revenge narratives where loyalty to a deceased patriarch gives legitimacy to the actions of their heirs. Indeed, revenge narratives in Shakespeare and beyond are generally based on father-son emotional dynamics. These emotional dynamics are described as monarchic by Martha C Nussbaum in her book Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. In Victorian and contemporary horror fiction, the father-son dynamics are more complex as the royal father is the past self of the revenant. 

*CFP* "NATIONHOOD, IDENTITY, AND SPECULATIVE FICTION", BOOKS BEYOND BOUNDARIES CONFERENCE

Books Beyond Boundaries Conference: Nationhood, Identity, and Speculative Fiction

15th-16th January 2021,

Ulster University, Belfast Campus

 

'Culture is the context within which we need to situate the self, for it is only by virtue of the interpretations, orientations and values provided by culture that we can formulate our identities, say ‘who we are’, and ‘where we are coming from’ (Benhabib, 2000:18)

From C.S. Lewis to James Shaw, Northern Irish and Irish fiction is best known for its imagined histories, futures, and alternate realities. However, speculative fiction from writers of colour and ethnic minorities have been notably absent from the literary canon. While the island of Ireland has continued to grow more culturally diverse in the twenty-first century, there has been little engagement with how the cultural identity of Northern Ireland and Ireland has been transformed through immigration.

*CFP* "SPECULATIVE FICTION'S INTERSECTIONS WITH POSTHUMANISM AND NEW MATERIALISM", SPECIAL ISSUE, EXTRAPOLATION JOURNAL

Extrapolation invites papers for a special issue investigating how speculative fiction, broadly conceived, dramatizes the tensions between the material limitations of the body and efforts to think beyond the human subject in posthumanism and new materialism. Taking our cues from contemporary authors like Jeff VanderMeer, Nalo Hopkinson, Caitlín Kiernan, Kathe Koja, Ken Liu, and China Miéville, we will examine how experimentation with form serves to articulate human practices for enduring and even flourishing in our extra-human reality. We are particularly invested in the ways speculative texts critique the centrality of the human while remaining attentive to the lived experience of the material body as it responds to ecological, technological, and economic demands that exceed human capacities of understanding.

Despite its modest aim to investigate thought and life that operates beyond the boundaries of enlightenment humanism, the field of the critical posthumanities often employs a rhetoric of extremes that invites us to abolish, expunge, contort, challenge, and undo the category of the human entirely. Yet, this expansive model of posthuman(ist) thought is often haunted by bodies, environments, and matter that resist being tamed by intellectual abstraction. Concomitantly, the turn to new materialism takes up problems of inter-relation and ecological co-constitution, offering ethical practices for coping with threats posed by the Anthropocene. Aiming to think more expansively than anthropocentrism allows, new materialist discourse disavows the human subject as the agent of our world to describe, instead, how agency—or animacy—is distributed beyond the human. 

*CFP* "POSTHUMANISM AT THE MARGINS: ON FILM, MEDIA, AND NEW WAYS OF BEING", SPECIAL ISSUE, SYNOPTIQUE: JOURNAL OF MOVING IMAGE STUDIES

The term posthumanism has, throughout its relatively short lifespan, swelled to encompass any number of definitions and permutations, ranging from a descriptor for a technological afterlife of the “human” to a critical look at ways of being within a wider ecology. The immediate quandary that any scholar of the posthuman faces is the wrangling of a proper definition for such an expansive yet timely topic. It is precisely this ambiguity that we hope to engage with in this issue of Synoptique, as the amorphous idea of the posthuman offers us the chance to re-examine the “human.”

Traditionally, posthumanism has remained “committed to a specific order of rationality, one rooted in the epistemological locus of the West” (Jackson 2013, 671). By building upon such legacies of radical perspectives that decentre traditional Western humanist paradigms, such as deanthropocentrism, decoloniality, feminist, and Queer lenses, we aim to place posthumanism in conversation with film and media studies, with the goal of highlighting the historically marginalized perspectives central to this intersection. We believe that film and other new media are uniquely situated to address these sets of questions due to the breadth of disciplines they intersect with, as well as their positions between the technological and the cultural. We invite submissions to consider how different forms of media may challenge, transform, and transcend traditional paradigms of the posthuman; we especially invite submissions of alternative media such as video essays, zines, or other art pieces.

*CFP* CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS, NEXT ISSUES, ETHNOMUSICOLOGY REVIEW

Deeply interdisciplinary, the field of ecomusicology is a branch of study exploring the various and complex nexus between people, nature and sounds. Ecomusicologists can come from the fields of composition, acoustic ecology, bio-acoustics, ethnomusicology, historical musicology, biology as well as ecocriticism, biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, phenomenology.

Ethnomusicology Review would like to invite you to share perspectives from your research for our online platform "Sounding Board." Texts on any of the following subjects are welcome:

• Music and Climate Change 
• Music in the Age of Anthropocene 
• Post humanities and sounds /music / acoustic patterns 
• DNA / Metabolic / Transgenetic poetics and sounds 
• Music in or about Landscapes 
• Natural Sounds, acoustic ecology, bio-acoustics 
• Music and/in Environment 
• Music and/ in Place or Space 

*CFP* CALL FOR PARTICIPATION, "QUEER TEMPORALITIES" IN LITERATURE, CINEMA, AND VIDEO GAMES INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

“Queer Temporalities” in Literature, Cinema, and Video Games International Conference.

2-4 December 2021

Online

 

While the study of space has been part of the Queer Studies agenda for a very long time, time has been a more recent addition. This International Conference sees the study of time as being central to the understanding of identity configurations. Studying time as a producer and reproducer of identities can be approached as the unearthing of past events, the imagining of other futures, or as the exploration of time as a formal factor that shapes cultural texts. While conceptions of time as something linear, stable, singular, and unequivocal favor existing discourses about equally unequivocal identities, approaches to time as being defined by multiple rhythms, interruptions and uncertainties allow for other identities and cultural / social practices to come to life in time or through specific representations of time. 

*CFP* "RE-INTRODUCTIONS TO CULTURAL SCIENCE", SPECIAL ISSUE, CULTURAL SCIENCE JOURNAL

Cultural Science Journal is an Open Access (free for authors to publish) journal that was started by Professor John Hartley and colleagues in 2008 at the Queensland University of Technology. Most recently it has been published by Ubiquity Press and Curtin University’s Centre for Culture and Technology. After 13 years of activity the editorship of the journal is handed over this year to professors Indrek Ibrus and Maximilian Schich, both of Tallinn University. The journal will be published by Tallinn University's Cultural Data Analytics Open Lab and it is currently being transferred to Sciendo platform.

Cultural Science Journal continues to be a multidisciplinary journal publishing original work on change and dynamics in culture, media and communications. It investigates structures, interactions, and processes of cultural systems at all levels of analysis and scales of application.

The Journal takes advantage of advances in cultural analytics, cultural data science, and cultural semiotics. It encourages active dialogue with evolutionary and institutional economics, biosemiotics, complexity science, network analysis, research in and cultural history and cultural evolution, specifying the ‘uses of culture’ from personal meanings to planetary platforms and systems of meaning.

*CFP* "DRAGONS IN LITERATURE, FILM AND POP CULTURE", A SERIES OF EDITED VOLUMES

As the popularity of mythical creatures in films and literature grows, there is one creature that remains prominent: the dragon. Dragons have become most visible recently in the cinematic versions of The Hobbit and in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones Series). However, there are other films, such as Dragonslayer (1981), Reign of Fire (2002), Dragonheart (1996), and the How to Train Your Dragon series (2010-2019), and numerous adult and children’s literature series that feature dragons.

This call for papers will result in several themed volumes under each of these main headings:

Dragons in Children’s Literature [picture books through young adult] and Graphic Novels

Working Title: Wings, Wonders, and Warriors: Dragons in Children’s Literature (due to the number of essays already received, this volume will be first) I still need 7-8 essays to round out the collection, but those received are appropriate to the volume.

*CFP* "ANIMALITY AND TEXTUALITY", SPECIAL ISSUE, WORD AND TEXT JOURNAL

In “But as for me, who am I (following)?”, the second section of The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida contextualises his interest in a certain passage in Plato’s Phaedrus as a systematic interest in what he calls “the animality of writing”. Derrida diagnoses in the traditional anthropocentric opposition between the (human) ability to respond and mere animal reaction an echo of the ancient denunciations of writing as language that cannot reply back – opaque and mindless. In fact, as he demonstrates in Of Grammatology and elsewhere, the histories of the condemnation of writing and of the devaluation of animality are intertwined and feed off each other. Both are characterised as a deviation from the source of truth – speech and/or the soul – carried out by a certain embodiment.

In the current state of the increasingly institutionalised field of Animal Studies, the same opaqueness that was held against both animality and writing has been defended as a productive nexus in which to think about animals and their relationship to text. For example, Anat Pick’s concept of the creaturely, characterised by its focus on embodiment, has proved influential in conceptualising both animal and human being.

*CFP* "POSTHUMAN DRAG", EDITED COLLECTION

Is drag separable from gender? A preponderance of self-described "drag things" (versus drag kings and queens) specializing in performances of non-human entities and appearing everywhere from stages in local gay bars to digital platforms like Instagram and YouTube would suggest so; however, when we speak of drag in academic literature, we hew closely to notions of drag as demonstrating gender performativity above all else. This collection therefore seeks to theorize a previously underrepresented form of drag performance that does not necessarily play with gender so much as it plays with humanness:We call this "posthuman drag."

Since the inception of Queer Studies, the transformational art form of drag has provided a deep well from which to draw theorization on embodiment and gender performativity; Judith Butler's extensive scholarship on gender in particular has given us a means to use drag as a lens for denaturalizing the social and cultural preconceptions through which gendered embodiment is heteronormatively conditioned. Though Butler's work helped to rehabilitate drag by disentangling it from an essentialist pre–Queer Studies definition as an exclusively gay cismale practice of female impersonation, there remains a divisive bias toward drag queen performance in academic scholarship on drag (already perceptible in one of the first book-length studies on drag, Esther Newton's 1972 Mother Camp). Additionally, studies of drag tend to lean on a framework that perceives the relationship between drag and gender differentially on the basis of gendered embodiment, which is intimately bound to the cissexist norms against which drag would otherwise be capable of working.

*CFP* "FEMINISMS NOW", A VIRTUAL FEMINIST STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 2021 CONFERENCE

Feminisms Now: A Virtual Conference

The Korean Society for Feminist Studies in English Literature (KFSEL)

28th-29th May, 2021

Via Online

 

The Korean Society for Feminist Studies in English Literature (KFSEL) presents a virtual conference on “Feminisms Now” to be held on Zoom from Friday, May 28, 2021 to Saturday, May 29, 2021.

Women everywhere have disproportionately shouldered the social and economic fallout of COVID-19. Taking seriously the pandemic’s regressive impact on domestic violence, female care work, and women in the labor force, we invite scholars, students, and activists to discuss practical and theoretical challenges for feminism today. Beyond the gendered consequences of the pandemic, we’ll reflect on how recent movements such as #MeToo engage new technologies such as digital media to operate locally and globally. How might culturally contingent, specific concerns gain wider traction and concrete executive force? Is international feminist solidarity possible under the current conditions of global inequality and racist violence? Can feminism respond effectively to the rise of misogyny on social media?

*CFP* "UTOPIA ON THE TABLETOP", EDITED COLLECTION

“Quite the contrary, Skepticus. I believe that Utopia is intelligible, and I believe that game playing is what makes Utopia intelligible.” 

Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Play, and Utopia

All submissions should in some way address the theme of utopia in relation to TTRPGs. Additional themes might include dystopia, heterotopia, decoloniality, critical humanism and posthumanism, performance and performativity, post-work and anti-work, post-scarcity, degrowth and post-growth, anti-carceral feminism, solarpunk, techno-utopianism, critical design, critical play, gamebooks and solo roleplaying, roleplaying as writing, serious and applied games, play therapy, political activism and organizing, participatory democracy, radical cartography, de-anthropic play, de-anthropic utopianism, gamification, Quantified Self, AI, and digital technologies. We welcome all approaches, e.g. close analysis of a single TTRPG; comparative analysis of several TTRPGs; proposals engaging with design philosophies or other conversations that have played out over blogs, Discord, and other social media; proposals for introductory overviews of a relevant phenomenon; proposals focused on a particular designer, press, mechanic, norm, subculture, movement, hashtag, etc. We especially welcome submissions that will shine a light on work by BIPOC game designers, writers, and creators.

*CFP* "GOING VIRAL: CHRONOTOPES OF DISASTER IN FILM AND VISUAL MEDIA", VOLUME 26 (2022), EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

In her seminal text Illness as Metaphor (1978), Susan Sontag approaches the discourses around contagious diseases as systems of power and control over civil disobedience and difference. The text poignantly foreshadows the “treatment” of the HIV outbreak by Western public health providers and in the cultural imagination alike. The recent outbreak of the coronavirus around the world prompts us to revisit Sontag’s suggestion in the context of the expanding global crisis. In globalized media, a universally perceptible iconography of catastrophe and annihilation is constantly (re)produced. However, narratives of contamination and epidemics in film and television have been flourishing in the past two decades. It is in these times that we consider it essential to examine these narratives, as they offer a vital space to reflect on the (post-)human, on conflicting modes of physical and virtual interaction, the permeability of all physical borders, the normalization of bodily vulnerability, the legitimization of authoritarian politics in states of emergency, and the biopolitical use of science and technology.

Surprisingly, there has been very little research in English Studies on the audiovisual experience of the “virus” as a laboratory for our perception of disorder. Implementing mechanisms of empathy, testing the pandemic effect of synaesthesia, and constantly challenging the way we make meaning through our encounter with crisis landscape, cinema, TV series, virtual reality films or even video art and net.art construct what Luciana Parisi defines as an architecture of infection: “an experiential mutation between the abstract and the concrete.” 

*CFP* "ARTIFICIAL CREATIVITY", SPECIAL ISSUE, Nº 36, TRANSFORMATIONS: JOURNAL OF MEDIA, CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY

Special issue of Transformations: Journal of Media, Culture and Technology, in collaboration with Medea research lab, Malmö University, Sweden. Guest editors are Dr. Bojana Romic and Dr. Bo Reimer, Malmö University, Sweden.

This special issue (#36) of Transformations entitled “Artificial Creativity” aims to stir a discussion about the cultural, societal, and ethical aspects of robots or AI engaged in creative production.

Machines engaged in creative activities can be traced back to Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s automata The Writer and Musical Lady (1770s), which involved calligraphic writing and the performing of music respectively. In the 1950s, Jean Tinguely’s Méta-matics produced generative artworks, in response to the long-standing questions about the role of the artist.

Most recently, a number of artworks have featured robots that draw (Robotlab), paint (Moura), or make music (Weinberg, 2020). It has been announced that the 10th Bucharest Biennale in 2022 will be “curated” by Jarvis, an AI system created by Spinnwerks, Vienna (FlashArt, 2020).

*CFP* "THE POST-PANDEMIC WORLD: A BAD PICTURE OR A GOOD OPPORTUNITY?", COMMUNICATION MANAGEMENT FORUM 2021

Communication Management Forum 2021

The post-pandemic world: A bad picture or a good opportunity?

19th and 20th March, 2021

Edward Bernays University College,  Virtual Conference

 

In addition to the health situation, the coronavirus pandemic has affected all segments of society. The economy and social life have entered a state of dormancy, interpersonal relationships take place under the influence of physical distance or have been transferred to the digital world, business travel has proved unnecessary in the world of teleconferencing, people's social lives have changed, young people are changing patterns for finding a partner, new practices have been introduced in the education system, the psychosocial health of individuals is under threat. 

 

At all levels, the pandemic has completely changed the outlook and functioning of the entire world. The question is in which direction will societies develop in the future, how will citizens behave after the pandemic, how will interpersonal relationships be established, but also how will employers and employees, whose attitudes have partially changed, behave?

*CFP* "VISUALISING THE SELFIE MOVEMENT: DOCUMENTING DIGITAL MATERIALITIES", VISUAL ESSAYS, THE DIGITAL CULTURE AND EDUCATION JOURNAL

Covid-19 has transformed the way we work. With domestic space now positioned up front and centre in daily working life, the humble home bookshelf has been transformed into a professional platform. Heightened online time has invited novel habits and trends such as taking, sharing and appreciating shelfies. This special issue invites visual essays on ideologies, ontologies, and epistemologies circulating in shelfies within formal and informal contexts.

Shelfies throw into relief ways of being, thinking, and valuing (or not) spaces. What objects are foregrounded and backgrounded in shelfies? What is visible and invisible? In what ways are shelfies political, affective, hermeneutic, and contested?

Visual responses to the shelfie movement have the potential of opening up a new lens for conducting and interpreting research. In addition, visual articles give (more) room to present and theorise people’s relationships with the liminal spaces we move in and out of during and post-COVID.

*CFP* "POSTHUMAN MIMESIS: EMBODIMENT, AFFECT, CONTAGION", INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE (ONLINE)

Posthuman Mimesis: Embodiment, Affect, Contagion

International conference

20-22 May 2021, KU Leuven (Online)

 

The ERC Project Homo Mimeticus: Theory and Criticism is pleased to announce an international online conference on the subject of “Posthuman Mimesis” hosted by the Institute of Philosophy at KU Leuven (Belgium). While the term “posthuman” covers a wide range of notions that account for the (bio-)technological modifications to the human body, consciousness and subjectivity, this conference focuses on the role imitation plays in the plastic transformations constitutive of the posthuman turn. Establishing a first bridge between major thinkers who accounted for “how we became posthuman” (Hayles) and a recent return of attention to behavioral imitation, this interdisciplinary conference proposes to look back to the ancient realization that humans are, for better and worse, mimetic creatures, in order to look ahead to protean transformations that transgress boundaries dividing mind from body, self from others, the human from the non-human and the non-living.

*CFP* "NEW MEDIA / NEW SOCIETY?", CHAPTER BOOK

New Media / New Society? will focus effects of new media on social relations. This volume has a question: Can we describe our society as a new media society? It intends to open new discussions on new media and social relations. The volume interrogates the question of whether (or not), and to what extent, new media have spawned new varieties of social organization, new practices of social interaction and identity, and new structures of material or symbolic social relations. There have been so many claims regarding how postmodern/postindustrial media modalities are contributing to various iterations of utopian and anti-utopian futures, beyond those traditional views of Orwell, Huxley, Marx, and Weber, for example. In the past decades, we have heard academic claims about a variety of effects, for example, including (but not limited to) simulation, misinformation, balkanization, intersectionality, assemblages, affordances, liquification, disruption, fragmentization, saturation/distraction, propaganda, mediatization, culture wars, (de/post/neo)colonization, modes of signification, gamification, crowdsourcing, participatory media, hypertextualization, assimilation, chaos, spectacles, virtuality, augmented reality, digitization, disconnection, mass surveillance, and cyborgology.  On the other hand, there have been so many descriptions of society, for example including (but not limited to) information society, post-emotional society, consumption society, network society, internet society, cyber society, new media society, post-modernism, post-humanism, the Anthropocene, and digital society.

*CFP* "PLATFORMED BODIES", SPECIAL ISSUE, MEDIEKULTUR: JOURNAL OF MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

Over the last couple of decades, the global social, political and economic landscape has been marked by rise and dominance of social media. These transnational owned social media and communication services fundamentally alter both the ways economic value is produced, as well as the fundamental ways that social life is lived. To understand this dual impact we have seen a wealth of theoretical innovation, with platform studies proven to be an immensely powerful instance (Gillespie, 2010; Van Dijck, et al., 2018). In an early work, Van Dijck supplies a key intervention when suggesting that techno-cultural constructs and socioeconomic structures should be integrated in an ecological approach to better capture “the mutual shaping of social media and the culture of connectivity” (Van Dijck, 2013, 26). In other words, intertwining cultural and economic analysis is key for understanding the current moment in which digital platforms, services and devices are of increasing importance to more and more aspects of society and everyday life. 

In this analysis however, the question of the body as a somatic reality, a social construct, and a site of experience and contestation, is less clear. It is this intersection that this special issue of MedieKultur takes aim at. We invite submissions that combine analysis of platforms and the body.

*CFP* "GENDER, SEXUALITY AND EMBODIMENT IN DIGITAL SPHERES: CONNECTING INTERSECTIONALITY AND DIGITALITY", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF DIGITAL SOCIAL RESEARCH

The emergence and development of different digital media in the past decades have sparked interest, debates, and scholarly challenges across many social science and humanities disciplines. Within this scholarship, the research on digitality, gender, sexuality, and embodiment has contributed substantially to many fields, including sociology, gender, feminist, and media studies. This scholarship has, however, gone beyond the question of gender and has extended to the realms of queer studies, disability studies, security studies, critical race studies, and citizenship studies, among others. With such a high level of multi- and interdisciplinarity, theories, methods, and analyses of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres has become highly diversified.

What we seek

This special issue of JDSR has two goals. First, it aims to bring together innovative and newly developed theoretical, empirical, analytical, and critical approaches in the study of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres.  Second, by connecting intersectionality and digitality, we aim to adopt an integrated approach that reflects the intricacy and interconnectedness of social markers and categories of difference, privilege, performance, and discrimination. As such, we specifically encourage submissions that adopt an intersectional approach and address gender, sexuality, and embodiment as integrated with other social factors, such as — but not limited to — age, race, (dis)ability, religion, color, and nationality.