*CFP* "THE AESTHETICS OF CREATIVE ACTIVISM", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM

As both a field of study and form of practice, creative activism seeks to understand how artistic forms can serve the ends of activist interventions.

 

To date, most emphasis has been on the activism component, drawing on theories of social movement formation, participatory action, and community organising. While there has been passing mention of aesthetics (relying heavily upon Rancière) the ‘creative’ term in creative activism remains woefully undertheorized. There are some scholars who have asked important questions about affect and effect, but overall, creative activism is ripe for deeper research into and theorisation of its aesthetic forms. Key questions include how creative activism differs from other activism, what makes it creative, and how (whether) the artistic components function effectively to achieve or enhance social change.

The Editors welcome submissions on any philosophically informed exploration of artistic forms as activist interventions, including, but not limited to:

• Ethics and morality in and of artistic activism

*CFP* "SEEING THE (IN)JUSTICE OF SUSTAINABILITY: VISUALIZING INEQUALITY AT THE CENTRE OF CLIMATE CHANGE COMMUNICATION", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL MEDIA

We know that environmental change due to massive global warming negatively influences the world’s poorest and most-marginalized the most, as do the corporate and collective actions themselves that drive greenhouse gas emissions. With greater urgency, media scholarship – and practice – must now turn to the wicked problems associated with forms of human inequality that are sometimes linked to efforts to develop local and global sustainability: racialized gentrification of urban areas to form wetlands creates a forced migration of residents. The development of environmentally sound (and expensive) housing pushes out the poor. Mainstreamed media narratives of climate change activists elevate particular people and parts of the world over others. And yet such effects of sustainability are often invisible or missing from mediated discourses and arenas.

As notions of sustainability become more normalized as key to our shared social futures, they can remain tied to long-standing issues of racialized environmentalism shaping government and corporate decisions, as well as individual and collective interpretations of curbing climate change. ‘Climate change is the result of a legacy of extraction, of colonialism, of slavery’, Elizabeth Yeampierre, cochair of the Climate Justice Alliance, told PBS in the US in 2020. ‘The truth is that the climate justice movement, people of color, indigenous people, have always worked multi-dimensionally because we have to be able to fight on so many different planes.’ We share in this concern.

*CFP* "ON EXTRACTION AND MEDIA", BOOK CHAPTER

Our goal is to explore the relations of extraction that underpin and shape global media cultures. In what follows, we sketch out an invitation to foster collective scholarship on these relations across space and time. One outcome will be a book, but others are yet to be decided. Our words are not a CFP in the traditional sense, but instead a Call for Allies to co-create histories, explorations, and interventions.

On Extraction and Media begins as a dialectical quest. One part must examine media’s relationship to the deep legacies and processes of capitalist and industrial extraction. Our project builds on the histories of racialised capitalism as an environment-making force, formed by cycles of conquest, enslavement, extraction and the elemental separation of the “human” from “nature.” It is a deep history, of a colonial nomos, enabled by genocidal conquests of the Americas transforming land, biota, and climate in the Fifteenth Century, accelerated by human enslavement, the deforestation of land, and the expansion of plantations by a globalising Europe in the Sixteenth century transforming the commons into property and ordering the world by fictions of race. As is now well-known, the conversion of thermal and then fossil energy into mechanical energy across the long nineteenth century powered a technological and economic revolution. In the late nineteenth century, the discovery and harnessing of electricity, alongside new developments in chemistry, produced a second-stage industrial revolution. It is in the wake of these developments that new forms of “mass” media emerged, built from minerals and chemicals, and powered by electricity.   

*CFP* "THE PANDEMIC AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM: ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF OUR SOCIETIES AND ECONOMIES", ONLINE CONFERENCE

The Pandemic and the Future of Capitalism: On the Political Economy of our Societies and Economies

September 12-19, 2021

Online Conference

 

Given the continuation of the COVID pandemic, this year’s IIPPE Annual Conference will be online. As we will not all be in one place we will have an issue of time zones. To address this issue and simultaneously to reduce the number of panels at any one time, we plan to have two sessions of parallel panels per day for 8 days, plus an opening and closing plenary. We will have our usual pre-conference workshop the day before the conference begins; that is, on Saturday September 11.

IIPPE calls for general submissions for the Conference, and particularly welcomes those on its core theme on the pandemic and the state and future of capitalism. Proposals for presentations will as always be considered on all aspects of political economy. New participants committed to political economy, interdisciplinarity, history of political and economic thought, critique of mainstream politics and economics, and/or their application to policy analysis and activism are especially encouraged to submit an abstract.

*CFP* "IMÁGENES, IMAGINARIOS Y NUEVAS NARRATIVAS EN CONTEXTOS DE CRISIS", PRÓXIMO NÚMERO, IC: REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE INFORMACIÓN Y COMUNICACIÓN

Las imágenes, los imaginarios y las nuevas narrativas articulan, en la actualidad, modos de explicación de las diversas crisis (sociales, sanitarias, políticas, económicas y culturales) (Angulo, 2018; 2017b; 2017a; Arribas y Gómez Villar, 2014; Belzunegui Erazo, 2012; Castells, 2016; Cabrera, 2019; Butler, 2006; Lazaratto, 2013). Crisis y crítica tienen un ethos común (Browne, Del Valle, Silva Echeto, 2018; Del Valle y Silva Echeto, 2018; Richard, 2010; Silva Echeto, 2014). La etimología de la palabra “crítica” se asocia a la palabra “crisis”. El contenido de ambos términos designa “el momento decisivo en un asunto de importancia” y que, por lo tanto, reúne las acepciones de cortar, dividir, medir y también elegir, decidir y juzgar. Mientras la crisis es una potencia de mutación, la crítica es una fuerza de intervención. Los flujos segmentados y ramificados del capitalismo des-diferenció límites y fronteras, aunque trazó otras fronteras (por ejemplo en el caso de los flujos humanos-migratorios) y des-fronterizó otros (los flujos de capitales), nivelando “eclécticamente valores, gustos y opiniones en nombre del pluralismo de lo diverso” tendiendo “a anular el principio de la distancia (separación, distinción) que reclamaba la crítica modernista antes de ver tambalear su lugar de autoridad, invadida por la promiscuidad y la contigüidad de los signos que des-jerarquizan cualquier escala de valoración en un mundo de interpenetración de las redes que activan tráficos ambiguos entre lo uno y lo otro, lo igual y lo diferente, lo próximo y lo distante, lo integrado y lo disperso” (Richard, 2010: 24).

*CFP* "WHAT DOES THE ALGORITHM WANT? PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CRITIQUE OF DIGITAL CULTURE", SPECIAL ISSUE, CLCWEB

This special issue of CLCWeb asks: “What does the algorithm want?” Contributions are invited from scholars working in the area of psychoanalysis and digital/online media.

What does psychoanalytic criticism offer us as a practice for critically interrogating digital and online media?

Who among us does not already know about the critique of digital platforms? We hear all the time about big tech, big data, platform capitalism, communicative capitalism, surveillance capitalism, control society, and so forth. The Edward Snowden leaks about the PRISM program in 2013 provided evidence for what we all already secretly believed: that our online interactions and communications are all the time being monitored and collected by mega corporations and the government. 

The Cambridge Analytica scandal, revealed by whistle blower, Christopher Wylie, in 2018 taught us even more about the ways platforms manipulate users’ views of the world and the ways this impacts our actions and behaviours, our ethics and our politics.

*CFP* "POSTCOLONIALISM, POSTCOMMUNISM AND POSTMODERNISM", 3RD INTERNATIONAL INTERDISCIPLINARY ONLINE CONFERENCE

In our postmodern world there are a lot of questions that should be re-considered and re-defined. What does it mean to fight against colonialism and racism in the world of migration crisis and xenophobic attitudes towards minorities? What does it mean to be a postcommunist country in the face of the common nostalgia for order and rules? How is it possible to have a national identity being aware of the relative character of every national feature?

We want to examine the notions of postcolonialism, postcommunism and postmodernism as thoroughly as possible, from many perspectives and in variable aspects: in politics, society, psychology, culture, and many more. We also want to devote considerable attention to how these phenomena are represented in artistic practices: in literature, film, theatre or visual arts. We invite researchers representing various academic disciplines: history, politics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, economics, law, literary criticism, theatre studies, film studies, fine arts, memory studies, migration studies, consciousness studies, dream studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, medical sciences, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, cognitive sciences et al.

*CFP* "MIGRANT BELONGINGS: DIGITAL PRACTICES AND THE EVERYDAY", 2021 ONLINE CONFERENCE

Migrant Belongings. Digital Practices and the Everyday

22nd-23rd April 2020

Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Online Conference

Migrant belonging through digital connectivity refers to a way of being in the world that cuts across national borders, shaping new forms of diasporic affiliations and transnational intimacy. This happens in ways that are different from the ways enabled by the communication technologies of the past. Scholarly attention has intensified around the question of how various new technical affordances of platforms and apps are shaping the transnationally connected, and locally situated, social worlds in which migrants live their everyday lives.

This international conference focuses on the connection between the media and migration from different disciplinary vantage points. Connecting with friends, peers and family, sharing memories and personally identifying information, navigating spaces and reshaping the local and the global in the process is but one side of the coin of migrant-related technology use: this Janus-faced development also subjects individual as well as groups to increased datafied migration management, algorithmic control and biometric classification as well as forms of transnational authoritarianism and networked repression. 

*CFP* "WOKE TV: POLITICALLY ALERT TELEVISION IN THE TRUMP, BLM, AND POST-#METOO ERA", CHAPTER BOOK

Debate around ‘woke television’ has been increasingly more present in popular parlance. Within television criticism, there has been heavy reflecting on (and co-constructing of) a meta-genre of contemporary US television characterized by a particular sensitization to issues of social justice, racial justice, and gender equity and a showcasing of commitment toward denouncing institutional ideologies such as structural poverty, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Indeed, a swell of popular criticism has been quick to discern the micro-contexts of politically alert television fiction, discussing for instance African-American history and white privilege in Atlanta and Dear White People, diversity in Star Trek, progressive reimaginings of classic shows such as Buffy and Charmed, the gender-swap in Doctor Who, LGBTQ pedagogy in the revival of Will & Grace, multidimensional female characters in Glow, complex and unapologetic teen sexuality in Normal People, Big Mouth and Sex Education. These instances inform the notion of “woke television” as the inclusion of relevant and topical themes, blatantly calling out structural inequalities and delivering cultural texts that reify the pleasures and intricacies of ‘woke culture.’

Apart from celebrating contemporary television’s bold engagement with social, racial and gender-related issues, popular critical writing has simultaneously questioned the transformative and empowering implications of woke television, recognizing issues such as the ideological ambiguity of feminist shows (including the impossible-to-ignore whiteness of critically acclaimed The Handmaid’s Tale and the poshness of Fleabag), as well as the problematic representational strategies of gendered violence and rape (for example, in 13 Reasons Why).

*CFP* "CONFRONTING COVID-19: CONSTRUCTING AND CONTESTING LEGITIMACY THROUGH MEDIA IN CHINESE CONTEXTS", SPECIAL ISSUE, CHINESE JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION

Legitimacy justifies the acts and authority of social groups and organisations and makes them acceptable to other social members. As a global health crisis that sweeps the world, the Covid-19 pandemic has provoked a crisis of legitimacy that social actors and institutions face over their responses to or roles in the pandemic. Meanwhile, however, the pandemic may also open up opportunities for them to gain legitimacy. Naturally, social actors and institutions would endeavour to retain or gain legitimacy through many means, of which the media – including the news media and the Internet – is one of the most important instruments. This unprecedented scenario caused by the Covid-19 crisis thus raises many new (and old) questions for media and communication studies to address.

These questions concern, inter alia, the measures taken and the use of the media by governments, states, international organisations, science, and journalists to address the impact of the pandemic on their legitimacy; the changes of legitimacy-related social norms in the media, media discourses, and public perceptions and trust; and whether and to what extent the Covid-19 crisis enhances or endangers the legitimacy of presence and actions of diasporas in host countries and how these groups use the media to respond to this situation.

*CFP* "CAPITALISM IN GLOBAL CRISIS. ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS, NEW AUTHORITARIANISM AND RESISTANCE", DISCOURSENET WINTER SCHOOL Nº7

DiscourseNet Winter School Nº7

Capitalism in Global Crisis: economic transformations, new authoritarianism and resistance

13-15th of January, 2021

University of Valencia, Spain 

The DiscourseNet Winter School brings together advanced MA as well as PhD students (BA students with an own research project are also welcome) who want to pursue research on Capitalism in Global Crisis revolving around economic transformations, new authoritarianism, and resistance with respect to Discourse Studies and to discuss the methodological and theoretical challenges of their thesis projects or first ideas.

In the last decades, the economies in different countries and regions as well as the global economic power relations have changed. Three characteristics are significant: first, the US economic hegemony, expressed by a dominant position in almost all traditional leading industries, becomes step by step replaced by a tri-pole structure consisting by a rising Asian field of economic innovation (with China as regional superpower), a declining North American pole and a consolidating European pole (with Germany as regional hegemon) torn between the aspiring East and former West.

*CFP* "RESISTING JAMES BOND: POWER, PRIVILEGE, AND SOCIAL (IN)JUSTICE IN THE DANIEL CRAIG ERA", CHAPTER BOOK

When it was released in 2006, Casino Royale notably shifted the development and design of the James Bond films. The film not only introduces Daniel Craig in the title role but also reboots the iconic brand by retelling Bond’s origin story from the moment he attains his “00” license to kill. Across the orphan origin trilogy – Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace (2008), and Skyfall (2012) – the Bond formula is deconstructed, with defining elements either reworked or gradually reintroduced, effectively updating the films to compete in both narrative and visual terms against Hollywood blockbusters in the global film market. The sequels Spectre (2016) and No Time To Die (2020) continue to flesh out the violent personal history of Bond as he fights to ensure the physical safety and resource security of Britain and its allies.

While popular with critics and fans, the Craig era films relay troublesome messages about power, privilege, and issues of social, racial, and environmental justice. Depictions of sexism and misogyny are particularly pronounced as Bond’s character develops at the expense of women who are threatened, physically/sexually abused, professionally maligned, and/or killed. Moreover, the intersection of gender with race and age points toward multiple and coexisting experiences of violence and oppression. 

*CFP* "ENGELS@200: FRIEDRICH ENGELS IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL CAPITALISM", SPECIAL ISSUE, TRIPLEC JOURNAL

November 28, 2020, marks the 200th birthday of Friedrich Engels. The journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critque celebrates Engels’ birthday with a special issue, in which critical theorists reflect on the relevance of Engels’ works for the analysis of digital and communicative capitalism.

The special issue’s contributions shall provide perspectives that address the question: How do Friedrich Engels’ works matter for the critical analysis of digital and communicative capitalism?Contributions focus on single or several of Friedrich Engels’ works. Example questions that can, based on Engels, be treated in contributions include but are not limited to:

• How do the digital conditions of the working class look like today?
• What are digital working class struggles and how do they operate?
• What is the role of reproductive labour, including digital housework and digital housewifisation, in digital capitalism?
• What are Engels’ contributions to a Marxist-humanist critique of digital capitalism?
• What is digital scientific socialism?
• How can we make sense of digital utopias today?

*CFP* "RETHINKING DIGITAL LABOUR", SPECIAL COLLECTION, THE ECONOMIC AND LABOUR RELATIONS REVIEW

A number of important topics, themes and concepts frequently recur in studies of digital labour, such as exploitation, precariousness (Standing 2011), ‘the gig economy’ (Graham 2019), and unpaid labour, including those of digital ‘users’ (Terranova 2004) and audiences. Concepts of immaterial, affective and emotional labour have been widely prevalent (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2005). This first generation of critical research has drawn, often valuably so, on a variety of Marxist, post-structuralist and Weberian sources to question prevailing neo-liberal and centrist models centred on values of efficiency and the supposed empowerment of workers and users. Some debates in East Asia follow this tendency to explore labour issues in the digital economy, such as platform workers (Chen and Kimura 2019, Chen 2018, Steinberg 2019, Shibata 2019) and workers in the technology assembly factories (Pun 2005, Qiu 2016, Sacchetto and Andrijasevic, 2015).

While these topics, themes and concepts have been beneficial in establishing a basis for critique, there is a danger that, at least in the form they have been applied, they may become rather familiar and in some cases potentially even a little stale. If so, this suggests a need to renew critique of digital labour, as the digital realm stabilizes around a set of key global players and platforms and as labour activists continue to face serious obstacles to success in an era of authoritarian populism. With its broad scale in the valorization of digital work, here, we concentrate our arguments on the professional workers in the information and communication technologies (ICT) related industries.

*CFP* "MARGINALIZED WOMEN AND WORK IN 20TH -AND 21ST- CENTURY BRITISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE AND MEDIA", CHAPTER BOOK

The uneasy relationship between women and work in literature is widely studied through the novels published mostly in the 19th century due to women’s participation to the work force in great numbers, which was considered as a popular topic for women writers. Particularly female factory workers and working-class women are particularly depicted in well-known middle-class writers’ works such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871), Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) and Work (1873), and Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life (1874). Although the criticism of such novels is the portrayal of mostly working-class white women’s struggle in the work force, while women of color, unpaid work, voluntary/ social work, working women and media, and stigmatized work are some of the topics that are neglected in the scholarship about women and work.

To fill this void, the proposed edited volume aims to examine the significant relationship between underrepresented woman and work. We seek critical essays about literary works on woman’s labor written in 20th- and 21st-century British and American literature and media. As a cross-cultural study on woman’s work in capitalist economies, the proposed text seeks contributions that discuss works of neglected, marginalized, and underrepresented writers and filmmakers and aims to provide an intersectional approach to previously unconsidered intellectual analysis of non-canonical authors and genres.

*CFP* "DIGITAL EDUCATION IN A TIME OF CRISIS: REFLECTIONS, CRITIQUES, AND CONVERSATIONS", NEXT ISSUE, DIGITAL CULTURE AND EDUCATION JOURNAL

As an open-access journal focused on the overlaps between technology, education, and culture, we at Digital Culture and Education (DCE) believe there is a pressing need to critically explore and reflect upon the ways in which we find education and technology are enmeshing in this unique and pivotal moment.

Beyond much-needed practical advice about how to use the many systems that are being proposed to address practical and pedagogical challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns remain about a number of issues. For example, concerns about the ways in which educational technologies create and perpetuate inequity; about which voices are emphasised online and which are minimised; about whether this is a pivot point and what it means for the future of higher education; about the creeping data surveillance and the information we reluctantly give away to access these pedagogical solutions; about the ethics and agendas of the companies producing these interventions; and about whether these technologies are fit for purpose.

*CFP* "POLITICAL IMAGINARIES OF SMALL CINEMAS AND CULTURES", 11TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

11th International Conference

Political Imaginaries of Small Cinemas and Cultures

Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

September 11-12, 2020

In a world of mainly undisputed capitalism, growing populism, increased global mobility, migration catastrophes, and minority activism, new forms of political experience and imaginaries are emerging. For this reason, film and cultural studies need to reconsider the range and impact of the political and social forces that drive, within global frameworks, the construction and circulation of cultural products. Charles Taylor describes the social imaginary as a way to convey both the subjective realm of social existence and the collective strata of common practices and of perpetually evolving political institutions. The notion of the imaginary has emerged across diverse fields in the humanities and social sciences, as well as in other disciplines. However, film studies have not convincingly addressed the way in which small cinemas have attempted in the last decades to translate cultural, economic, social complexities on screen. The question is how images of the social, political, ideological were reshaped in the (post)neoliberal age and what effects they have on the cultural production of small nations.

*CFP* CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS, CULTURE IN QUARANTINE JOURNAL

With approximately one-fifth of the world’s population currently in lockdown, the novel coronavirus (COVID–19) pandemic has drastically changed many of our lives. According to official statistics, the virus has now infected over one million individuals across 209 countries and territories, and such draconian measures are likely to have saved countless lives. But, the effects of the virus reach far beyond its biological capacity to cause illness. Originating in Wuhan, China, its rapid spread across national boundaries has drawn attention to the porous and interconnected world that we live in. The resulting economic consequences of the lockdown measures highlight the volatility of the global economy and the precarity of those whose labour sustains it. At the same time, it has transformed the way we interact with one another and understand ourselves, as new forms of creativity and solidarity emerge. In the time of coronavirus, both critical cultural analysis and sustained personal reflection are needed more than ever to put these emerging new realities into perspective.

*CFP* "THE LITERARY JOURNALIST AS NATURALIST", CHAPTER BOOK

Nature --or perhaps the way modern capitalism objectifies and destroys nature-- is the topic of our time. It has, thus, been the at the core of an extensive list of long form journalistic narratives in the past century and has spun hundreds more in the past decade. With the narrative of the Green New Deal as a background, the May, 2018 United Nation report about a million species at risk of extinction due to human activity, and the unstoppable increase in global temperatures as a result of human activity, matched with the inaction and incapacity of world governments to stop this process, “The Literary Journalist as Naturalist” aims at compiling a thorough, academically entertaining and comprehensive snapshot of long journalistic narratives about nature in a time of drastic change.

Bill McKibben, Rebecca Solnit, John McPhee, Carl Safina, Elizabeth Kolbert, David Wallace-Wells, some of the names you will read about in this anthology, followed the visionary steps of Rachel Carson, the pioneering environmental journalist and picked up the mantle delivering the harrowing narratives of our dire times.

*CFP* "COMMUNICATION, CAPITALISM AND CRITIQUE: CRITICAL MEDIA SOCIOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY", ESA RN-18 MID-TERM CONFERENCE

Communication, Capitalism and Critique: Critical Media Sociology in the 21st Century

ESA RN-18 mid-term conference, Turin, Italy, 10-12/9/2020

We live in times of deepening economic, political, social, ideological and ecological crises that are expressed in widespread precarious labour, the commodification of (almost) everything, the rise of new nationalism, populism and authoritarian forms of capitalism, and ecological destruction. The display of power and counter-power, domination and spaces of power struggles, and the commons and the commodification of the commons characterise modern society. Contradictions and antagonisms between the haves and the have-nots shape contemporary Europe and beyond. Media and communication are fields of conflict in this power struggle: they are power structures and sites of power struggles, able to support both the expansion and the commodification of the commons.

On reflection of the conference place, Turin was the city where Gramsci lived, was politically active and where he set up the weekly newspaper ‘L’Ordine Nuovo’ and acted as editor of the newspaper ‘Il Grido del Popolo’. Gramsci exerted influence on the study of culture and communication in society. ESA RN18’s mid-term conference in Turin is an occasion for media/communication/cultural sociologists to ask: What is the relevance of Gramsci and other approaches and thinkers inspired by Marx for the study of communication and society today?