*CFP* "IMÁGENES Y SONIDOS DE LAS GEOPOLÍTICAS URBANAS", Nº 24-2022, REVISTA FOTOCINEMA

El cine y la fotografía han conformado y siguen conformando un imaginario colectivo a través de las imágenes urbanas que desde sus inicios han estado presentes en el celuloide. Las ciudades son escenarios y protagonistas de los metrajes (CAPARRÓS, 2013), se convierten muchas veces en espacios museísticos y en ocasiones llegan a identificarse con espacios a modo de “parque temático”, según la elección de escenarios. Las imágenes urbanas que los cineastas y fotógrafos han recogido en sus obras, han condicionado a menudo nuestra percepción de la ciudad (CAMARERO, 2013: 6), captándolas desde ángulos muy diferentes y con voluntades muy diversificadas: desde las city symphonies como reflexiones complejas sobre las relaciones entre la vanguardia, el cine y la ciudad (GAUTHIER, 2015: 54-55; HUESO, 2013) hasta los escenarios de la imaginación que albergan utopías y distopías, pasando por escenarios recreativos y retratistas de las revoluciones urbanas, lugares costumbristas, destruidos o en construcción, enclaves de conflictos bélicos y de avances cosmopolitas, espacios de una metamorfosis que es signo y significado de la acción (cf. CAMARERO, 2013). Existen muchos tipos de ciudad, tantos como interpretaciones puede tener la propia urbe si nos atenemos a “la mirada del cine” y a las multiplicidades plásticas que en tanto que objeto tiene, como “espacio de modificación”, en el propio cine y en la arquitectura. Pero las ciudades son también contenedores espaciales de eventos geopolíticos (SCHWERTER, 2017: 8): sus calles, sus monumentos, su arquitectura moderna y antigua, la presente y la que ya no se conserva, la efímera y la que perdura; lo material que convive con lo intangible pero no por ello menos definidor del espacio, lo que no se ve, pero se escucha: la palabra, el sonido; aquello que se percibe y se vive: los actos recurrentes… 

*CFP* "THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SOFT POWER", BOOK CHAPTER

The First Edition of The Routledge Handbook of Soft Power contributed, through essays, (in Part One) to advancement in theorisation of soft power; and the clarification of soft power’s relationship with public diplomacy. It also offered research chapters, (in Part Two) on the use and or reception of soft power, across four swathes of the world – Europe and the Americas; the Middle East and Africa; Central and South Asia; and Northeast and Southeast Asia. There has been much change since it came out in 2017. The Second Edition will seek to further contribute to theory development, as well as map soft power issues that have become salient after 2017. The theory essay (Part One) and research article (Part Two) model will be retained, but content will be fully refreshed.

Geopolitical competition, accentuated by the pandemic of 2020-21, has had an impact on how actors treat soft power as a resource, and as a targeted outcome.  An old term, ‘sharp power’ has surfaced in the new geopolitical climate. The change in administrations in the United States portends a renewed emphasis on soft power; there has been talk at the highest levels of the need to focus on the power of example rather than the example of power.

*CFP* "COSMOPOLITAN STRANGERS IN LATINA/O LITERATURE AND CULTURE", EDITED VOLUME

This volume sets out to identify and analyze current definitions of the figure of the stranger, as well as ‘rooted’ or ‘vernacular’ cosmopolitanism at work in Latina/o literature with a cosmopolitan outlook that runs counter to discourses that criminalize ‘strangers’. While necessarily examining the workings of xenophobia, racism, gendering and othering in that specific context, we will focus on the alternative processes of interaction, conviviality, and inclusive practices.

While the stranger is a long-standing figure, the defining characteristics of the figure are specific in space and time. All studies of alterity implicitly contain the stranger (i.e., in postcolonial and gender studies, and critical multiculturalism). Most markedly, the figure of the stranger has been foregrounded in spatial and urban theory (Young 1986, Ahmed 2000, Sandercock 2003). The affinities between the stranger and the cosmopolitan subject have been recently dissected by Vince P. Marotta (2010, 2017), who conceives the stranger as a social type, and argues for its importance in understanding the human condition and cross-cultural interaction (2010, 106).

*CFP* "TOWARDS COSMOPOLITAN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES: BRINGING DIVERSE EPISTEMIC PERSPECTIVES INTO THE FIELD", SPECIAL ISSUE, GLOBAL MEDIA JOURNAL, GERMAN EDITION

This Special Issue of Global Media Journal Towards Cosmopolitan Media and Communication Studies engages with the ongoing conversation on diversifying perspectives in the field. We believe that it is a normative imperative to shape our field towards more openness as ‘research thrives in diversity, and not in the singular dominance of certain methods, theories, or approaches’ (Tandoc et al. 2020). Epistemic consequences of dominant modes of knowledge production risk being viewed as the only legitimate knowledge claims. It can lead to the invisibility of entire research landscapes’ linguistic terrains, prevalence of the English language as lingua franca and difficulties to establish a horizontal dialogue among communication scholars’ communities. #CommunicationSoWhite (Chakravartty et al., 2018) highlighted exclusion of scholarly voices. In the spirit of a more open discipline, we choose using the concept ‘academic cosmopolitanism’ as a helpful way of thinking to creating more inclusive networks and a democratic and open approach to scholarly exchange (Beck, 2006; Waisbord, 2016; Ganter & Ortega, 2019; Badr, et.al., 2020; Ganter, 2020).

Instead of lamenting the situation, we consider this Special Issue a practical scholarly response to contribute to opening media and communication studies up. Academic cosmopolitanism combines intellectual and structural critique and aspires to create common spaces with room for differentiation. This Special Issue is a chance to practice ‘mindful inclusiveness’ towards under-represented geopolitical, methodological, and theoretical strands (Rao, 2019).

*CFP* "VISUAL POLITICS IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH", EDITED VOLUME

This edited volume examines the novel ways in which political actors and citizens are producing, disseminating and consuming visual products in an increasingly diverse media landscape. Research on the role of the visual in politics is gaining momentum in scholarly work concerned with the current social media landscape. While governments, NGOs and politicians increasingly use visual forms of communication to promote themselves in social media platforms, the significance of the visual in political communication is also evidenced in citizens’ sharing of images and memes to make political statements, and in activists’ creative use of images and stylised objects to communicate and connect with wider audiences. While there is a growing body of scholarship in the field of visual political communication, most of this research has a strong empirical focus on the USA and Europe and neglects forms of visual politics that can be found in different sites across the Global South (Veneti et al., 2019; Holtz-Bacha et al., 2017; Grabe and Bucy, 2009).

Little is known about the ways in which scholarship in the Global South might challenge and resist western approaches to the study of the visual. Against this backdrop, the proposed volume seeks, on the one hand, to respond to pressing calls for a de-Westernisation of critical media studies (Milan and Treré, 2019) and, on the other, to present a range of original case studies that are specifically concerned with visual politics and communication in the Global South.

*CFP* "IMAGINED ISRAEL(S): PROJECTIONS OF THE JEWISH STATE IN THE ARTS", EDITED VOLUME

The image of Israel on the global stage is the product of the intersection between what it projects externally and what is projected onto it. While the state exports positive images in order to influence public opinion and private actors may publish critical representations of the nation, the non-Israeli uses Israel as a screen onto which an imagined country is projected. This is the case of the Jewish Diaspora whose relation with Israel is charged with elements strictly connected to its internal dynamics, as well as that of those not connected to the Jewish state, whose perceptions are greatly shaped by the international spotlight on the nation and the conflicts within it.

The arts have long served the purpose of representing a nation and embodying a country’s lasting values, while fostering a sense of collective memory. In today’s globalized world, the arts further function as a means of critical self-reflection on the nation, contemporary culture, and politics. On the screen, on the page, and on canvas, the image(s) of Israel produced by the nation’s artistic establishments stand next to oeuvres about the Jewish state produced by non-Israelis. These works evoke another Israel which speaks about the visions and hopes of the Diaspora.

*CFP* "DISTURBED ECOLOGIES: GEOPOLITICS AND THE NORTHERN LANDSCAPE IN THE ERA OF ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS", CHAPTER BOOK

We seek abstracts for chapters (6,000-8,000 words) to be considered for inclusion in an edited collection, for publication in Summer 2022. The proposed book is the third of a series published by Transcript Verlag, following /Northern Light: Landscape, Photography and Evocations of the North, Chris Goldie Darcy White (eds.), (2018), and Proximity and Distance in Northern Landscape Photography: Contemporary Criticism, Curation, and Practice, Darcy White Chris Goldie (eds.) (2020).

This book will consider a range of approaches examining the critical role of visual culture in shaping and interrogating conceptions of ecological crisis in relation to the northern landscape. The book will address the geopolitics of visual culture within debates concerned with the politics of climate change and ecological crisis. Its aim is to engage critically with recent debates about the Anthropocene: arguments concerned with identifying the socioeconomic and political causes of environmental crisis, and the problem in regarding the latter as the consequence of undifferentiated human activity.

*CFP* "RESILIENCE, EXPERTISE, HOPE", POLITICAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL 2021 CONFERENCE

Political Studies Association Annual International 2021 Conference

Resilience, Expertise, Hope

29th-31st March, 2021

Queens University Belfast, Northern Ireland

 

The Covid-19 pandemic will have a lasting impact on all aspects of our lives and the societies in which we live, providing new challenges, but also opportunities, in terms of how we think about and study socio-economic organisation, democratic institutions and international governance, as well as the fundamental questions of justice and equality that provide the normative underpinnings to social scientific research. The 2021 PSA Conference seeks contributions that address these multifarious challenges and opportunities in the context of three overarching themes: Resilience, Expertise and Hope.

 

Resilience, Expertise and Hope will be crucial ingredients in our ability to adapt and respond in the wake of fundamental disruption. They will also prove invaluable in informing and shaping diverse and evolving research agendas in political science to make sense of and understand the global economy, global ecosystems and the climate, public health, international security, and many other interrelated issue areas that combine to generate the most pressing challenges of our age. 

*CFP* "IBEROAMERICAN SCREENS/ PANTALLAS IBEROAMERICANAS", COLLECTION OF BOOKS

We have launched the series Ibero-American Screens / Pantallas Iberoamericanas in Peter Lang Publishing.

This series approaches the Ibero-American audiovisual field—cinema and television—from an interdisciplinary perspective, with special emphasis on studies stemming from Media Studies and Cultural Studies. We are especially interested in those volumes that examine audiovisual production in Latin America or/and the Iberian Peninsula from a comparative perspective. In addition, the collection will include studies on the production, distribution and circulation of audiovisual artifacts in the digital era. Consequently, we include works that explore the relationship between audiovisual media and other fields of popular culture, such as music, comic books, fashion and sports.

Likewise, we are interested in the intersection between ecology, urban studies and media. We accept both theoretical proposals on audiovisual media and historical approaches that scrutinize a specific period of cinema or television in one or several geopolitical spaces. The series includes volumes on industrial aspects and political economy as well as reflections on key issues for the articulation of both national and transnational imaginaries, such as memory and representational templates. The featured volumes can be monographs or collections of essays by different authors, in Spanish or English.

*CFP* "LGBTQI+ REFUGEES/ ASYLUM SEEKERS", EROSS 2021 CONFERENCE

LGBTQI+ Refugees/Asylum Seekers

EROSS - Expressions Research Orientations: Sexuality Studies

9th-10th April 2021

Dublin, to be held online

At the end of 2019, there were approximately 4.2 million people around the world waiting for a decision on their asylum claims (UNHCR). Amongst them is a particularly vulnerable group: LGBTQI+ people: sons, daughters, parents, partners and lovers, with horrendous histories of imprisonment, bodily harm, torture, and psychological trauma.

These atrocities are inflicted on them by their own governments, countrymen, and, worst of all, friends and families.This conference aims to discuss the situation of LGBTQI+  asylum seekers and refugees  who have committed no crime, yet cannot live freely in their own countries due to their sexual orientation or gender identity. 

*CFP* "20 YEARS LATER: LOOKING BACK AT 9/11", INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

20 Years Later: Looking Back at 9/11, International Conference

October, 7-8, 2021

University of Toulouse, Jean Jaurès, Francia 

Twenty years after the 9/11 attacks, the Universities of Toulouse and Montpellier in the South of France are joining forces to organize an international interdisciplinary conference on these events. Its aim is to analyze, not only the events and their short-term consequences with a two-decade hindsight, but also the many ways in which those events have been perceived, represented, commented upon, co-opted or rewritten along the years. It also invites reflections upon the way in which some of these responses, representations or co-optations have been in their turn received, commented upon and used in this 20-year period. The scope of the conference is interdisciplinary, as it welcomes contributions from scholars specializing in history (contemporary, political, institutional, military), geopolitics, international relations, sociology, psychology, law, economics, media and communication studies, literature, film studies, art, architecture, and popular culture. The conference is meant as a place for fruitful cross reflections on images, discourses, facts that have been seen, heard, told thousands of times, with varied intentions and perspectives. Joint paper proposals by two or three specialists from different fields are particularly welcome. Two interdisciplinary round tables will also be organized. 

*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* "DOING SOUTHERN STUDIES TODAY", INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE UNIVERSITY IN BERLIN

Doing Southern Studies Today

14th-15th January 2021

Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany

In the field of Southern Studies, the first twenty years of the 21st century were defined by attempts to formulate and visualize the future of Southern Studies, as evidenced by publications such as Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith’s South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture (2002), Jon Smith’s Finding Purple America: The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies (2013), or Zackary Vernon’s Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies (2019) – to name only a few. The “future,” most publications propose, lies beyond traditional narratives of Southern exceptionalism and sectionalism that promote a specific “sense of place” that cannot be found outside the South. A more dynamic and global understanding of the South needs to be implemented if Southern Studies wants to contribute to a critical engagement with current and past cultural and social developments, in and outside the U.S.

Despite the expansion of the scope of Southern Studies though, the ‘old’ questions remain: What and where is “the South”? What is “southern”? While “sense-of-place”-regionalism, a rather essentialist and nativist approach to being “southern,” is outdated, the concern with the “place of ‘place’” in Southern Studies remains. 

*CFP* “DECOLONISING FILM AND SCREEN STUDIES”, EDITED VOLUME

… you cannot mobilize a movement that is only and always against; you must have a positive alternative, a vision of a better future that can motivate people to sacrifice their time and energy toward its realization.

Obioma Nnaemeka, “Nego-feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,//29.2 (2003), p.364

Inspired by the RhodesMustFall movement at the University of Cape Town in May 2015, certain higher education institutions, individuals and collectives across the world have engaged in renewed, contemporary work to try to decolonise academia over the past four years. These movements are not new, and need to be historicised in relation to the long history of struggles for political decolonisation, complex engagement with the word “decolonisation” itself, and a wealth of significant theorizing around decolonising (e.g. wa Thiong’o 1986, Tuhiwai Smith 1999). These contemporary movements are also not uncontested, with some arguing that the term “decolonisation” has provided a useful way of bringing together academics from different disciplines with similar agendas around transformation, and others arguing that the term hides a range of distinct activities and practices, some of which appropriate or exploit the term without real commitment to fostering change.

*CFP* "YEARS IN CULTURAL STUDIES", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF THE CULTURAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION

Lateral, the journal of the Cultural Studies Association, seek ssubmissions for a unique collection of essays: Years in Cultural Studies.

What forgotten historical moments or contexts shaped the trajectory of cultural studies? How have individual scholars and broader social movements contributed to the cultural studies we know today? The special section of Lateral— “Years in Cultural Studies” —seeks to answer these questions and more through essays that interrogate cultural studies’ diverse, fragmented, and provocative history. Essays in this collection focus on specific years in the history of Cultural Studies.

“Years in Cultural Studies” seeks to provide a pedagogical resource, a place for documentation and excavation, and a forum for storytelling. We see this work as heeding the call Ted Striphas to do "care work" – that is, infrastructural, cultivating work – to support the field of Cultural Studies. Striphas asks, “What would it mean to imagine Cultural Studies as a ‘care discipline,’ or better yet as a field in which criticism and care cohabitate?” In this spirit, “Years in Cultural Studies” provides a collection of open, accessible, student- friendly histories of the field that allow all of us to learn more about its intellectual genealogies, struggles, and contexts.

*CFP* "SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM", SPECIAL ISSUE, GLOBAL MEDIA AND CHINA JOURNAL

Recent issues of Global Media and China have explored the specifically Chinese characteristics of internet services, involving a particular constellation of companies and services that is distinct from those developed in the USA. How do the particular affordances of the dominant Chinese internet services differ from those of Google, Amazon, Facebook and PayPal? The combination of financial information of personal data that WeChat now has is very different from that held by any Western corporation, where payment systems are separated from social networking systems. 

Indeed, Facebook’s recent attempt to launch a payment system similar to that of WeChat seems to have failed for a variety of reasons, including its potential to destabilise the Western banking system. It is now time for comparative studies and the development of an overview of the different constellations that have developed. Debates in the West are developing around the nature of the privatisation of online services in the age of big data and the intent of things. Two events have accelerated this debate. The first is the growing concern around the misuse of data about individuals and its potential for influencing behaviour, evidenced by the rise of ‘fake news’ in social media and the scandal round Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

*CFP* “LIFE CYCLES”, ISSUE 16, MEDIA FIELDS JOURNAL

Media lives. From the constant flow of broadcast news across time zones to the instant, constantly updated feed of social networks, the sense that our media is a living thing is central to our understanding and experience of it. While recent news lamenting the discontinuation of Adobe Flash Player and iTunes suggest media’s clearly delineated life expectancies—sparking nostalgic retrospectives and hurried campaigns to archive endangered content—the life cycles of media rarely resemble teleological timelines towards any deathly finality. As Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka argue, “Media never dies,” but instead “decays, rots, reforms, remixes, and gets historicized, reinterpreted, and collected.”

One need only look to online fake news campaigns that coopt and appropriate media content to construct new meanings of the past, or to the uncanny resurfacing of scandalous social media posts that undercut the supposed ephemerality of our digital footprint. If media never dies, then it is subject to perpetual recovery and transformation, especially in the contemporary context of a 24-hour news cycle that demands the unbroken replenishment of news stories to maintain a sense of never-ending liveness and feed the insatiable demands of global spectatorship.

*CFP* "COMMUNICATING HEALTH. FUNDAMENTALS AND PRACTICES TOWARDS A BETTER HEALTH", SPECIAL DOSSIER, COMUNICAÇÃO PÚBLICA JOURNAL

The special dossier ‘Communicating Health – fundamentals and practices towards a better health’ addresses communication in the health context, exploring the coding, transmission, promotion and reception of health contents aimed at reaching better health results and fostering healthier individuals and societies.

The existing literature tends to emphasize communication as a catalyst of results (Levinson, Roter & Mullooly, 1997; Ong, Haes, Hoos & Lammes, 1995, p. 903; Stewart 1995), as an effective bridge for establishing the therapeutic relation (Longnecker, 2010) and as a lever for massive and low cost dissemination of messages in the media (Wakefield, Loken & Hornik, 2014).

Communication is seen as the “need of the hour” (Ranjan, Kumari & Chakrawarty, 2015, p. 1) and as the “key to a healthier tomorrow” (Ratzan, 1994), bringing about answers for dealing with, and solving, communication problems in the health context: a) Europeans have low health literacy levels (HLS-EU, 2012). Over a third of USA adults (77 million people) will have difficulties with ordinary health tasks, such as following patient package insert instructions. 

*CFP* "POWER, FUTURE AND AGENCY", 8TH CONFERENCE ON STUDYING AND THEORIZING ON POWER RELATIONS

8th Conference on studying and theorizing on power relations

Power, future and agency

24-26 August 2020

University of Helsinki, Finland

Recent years have intensified a complex conjuncture of global challenges. Daily news explains in clear terms that we are gambling on environmental sustainability, with increasingly small odds on our side. Rapidly advancing datafication and algorithmically organized interactions affect the logics of interaction and opinion formation.

Experiences of intersecting inequalities sharpen differences, polarize political debates and create clashing camps both locally and globally.

*CFP* “MACHINE INTELLIGENCES IN CONTEXT: BEYOND THE TECHNOLOGICAL SUBLIME”, SPECIAL ISSUE, CULTURE MACHINE JOURNAL

We are seeking contributions for a special issue of Culture Machine – an international open-access journal of culture and theory – exploring Machine Intelligences in Context.

Culture Machine is a series of experiments in culture and theory. Its aim is to seek out and promote scholarly work that engages provocatively with contemporary technical objects, processes and imaginaries from the North and South. Building on its open ended, non-instrumental, and exploratory approach to critical theory, Culture Machine calls for creative scholarship and research that contests globalizing technical narratives and their environmental logics of extraction.

This special issue is a long overdue confrontation with the hype surrounding artificial intelligence. The supposed blessings that AI will bestow upon datafied societies, as well as the associated dangers, are now well-known both to the academic specialist and to the general public. Representatives from the tech sector and the world of politics claim that the fourth industrial revolution will be powered by AI and that AI will eventually become ubiquitous within politics, industry, culture and in everyday life.