*CFP* "CRITICAL ICT INFRASTRUCTURES AND PLATFORMS", 14TH CMI INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

 Critical ICT infrastructures and platforms

14th CMI International Conference

Hybrid (online/In-person): 25-26 November 2021

 

ICT infrastructures and platforms are increasingly pervasive and critical for societies, systems and organizations and for individuals. It is, therefore, of great importance that efficient and resilient infrastructures are developed and deployed and that disruptions of services caused by either cyber-attacks or other interruptions of services are mitigated. Also, as digital platforms constitute crucial communication infrastructures for societies, it is important that such platforms contribute to democratic processes and economic and social fairness.

The 14th CMI conference will be concerned with these topics from different complementary angles: The development and deployment of fast and efficient communication infrastructures including cloud and edge technologies; resilience of ICT systems in order to increase cyber security and mitigate cyber-attacks; institution of social practices and governance approaches that will promote democratic discussions and processes, contribute to economic and social development, equity and fairness, and protect privacy.

*CFP* "COMMUNICATION MAINTENANCE IN LONGUE DURÉE", A PAPER-BASED WORKSHOP

In the last decades, more and more scholars have claimed for an inclusion of maintenance among the key topics and key questions of technology (Edgerton 2007, Jackson 2014, Russell and Vinsel 2018, Henke and Sims 2020,). Communication and media studies have just partially included in their methodological and analytical tools reflections on maintenance (see Balbi and Leggero 2020; Weber and Krebs 2021) and this paper-based workshop aims to advance in this aspect adding another fundamental yet underestimated layer in communication and maintenance research: the longue durée.

Maintenance of communication infrastructures, for example, is a long-term process lasting for decades or even centuries. On the one hand, roads, networks and cables are constantly maintained to keep them functioning but, on the other, to understand their strategic relevance is important to adopt a longue durée perspective (Braudel 1958), since those channels of communication have often political, economic, and socio-cultural relevance. Sometimes, maintenance has a strong effect not only in preserving communication infrastructures, but also in modifying or even dismantling them. In long terms, communications can be radically changed because of maintenance and transformed into something totally different from what was originally to be maintained.

*CFP* "RETHINKING RELATIONS: MICHEL SERRES AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES", 2020 CONFERENCE

Rethinking Relations: Michel Serres and the Environmental Humanities

11-13 November, 2021

University of Konstanz, Germany

Few contemporary thinkers have explored the passages between the sciences and the humanities as poetically and vigorously as Michel Serres. Spanning from 1968 to 2019, his work presents an evocative cartography of the interstitial spaces that connect mathematics, philosophy, physics, myth, history, religion, literature, technology, media, ecology, and art. The baseline of his thinking is an appreciation of complexity, of the ways in which contingency generates newness and form emerges as a function of unforeseen translations, ruptures, and linkages.

With a penchant for the poietic processes of the natural world, he derives epistemological insight from the dynamics of oceans, mountains, clouds, storms, whirlpools, and tectonic plates—objects that are “multiple in space and mobile in time, unstable and fluctuating” (Genesis). Bridging the two cultures for him entails a ceaseless journey from “us to the world” (Hermes V), from the human to an environment that is never reified as an ontological outside. He recognizes that the production of knowledge is “always linked to an observer submerged in a system or in its proximity,” an observer who “is structured exactly like what he observes” (Hermes). 

*CFP* “UNMADE, UNFINISHED, UNSEEN: SHADOW HISTORIES OF CINEMA AND TELEVISION CONFERENCE”, MONTFORT UNIVERSITY

Unmade, Unfinished, Unseen: Shadow Histories of Cinema and Television Conference 

16-17 de Septiembre de 2020

De Montfort University, Leicester

Keynote speakers

Dr Shelley Cobb (University of Southampton)

Professor Andrew Spicer (University of the West of England), and others to follow.

Unmade films and TV programmes have become a subject of both academic and popular interest, driven partly by the opening of archives with significant holdings of unproduced screenplays. As well as books on Kubrick’s Napoleon and The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See, recent years have seen documentary films on ‘lost projects’ such as Lost in La Mancha (2002) and Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), radio adaptations of Unmade Movies like Welles’s Heart of Darkness, and stage readings of unproduced Hammer scripts such as Vampirella.

*CFP* "INFRASTRUCTURES AND INEQUALITIES: MEDIA INDUSTRIES, DIGITAL CULTURES AND POLITICS", ECREA CONFERENCE

 “Infrastructures and Inequalities: Media industries, digital cultures and politics”

ECREA Mid-Year Section Conference

21-22 October 2019

University of Helsinki, Finland

In a turn to ‘infrastructuralism’ (Peters 2015), media and communication scholars are increasingly attentive to the materialities and politics of the technological, organisational and cultural infrastructures that underpin media today. Platforms, data centres, software, but also new forms of organising cultural production and labour, shape the politics of digital cultures and transform the media industries. Digital and media infrastructures have become elemental to everyday life. They are significant in reproducing existing social and cultural inequalities, as well as creating new power struggles. As digital/media infrastructures unfold in everyday life, they bring challenges across multiple domains, from the foundations of social justice to the industrial structures underpinning our everyday interactions with media and communication systems. This conference aims to address the politics and inequalities that emerge, as technological and media industries adopt, dismantle and transform infrastructures to channel and process communication flows. Media infrastructures (broadly) operate under different and uneven conditions that configure media labour, media production, and the politics of communication and access (Starosielski and Parks 2015). This conference seeks to examine digital/media infrastructures and inequalities from an inter- and multi-disciplinary perspective, inviting papers to interrogate the significance of the ‘infrastructural turn’ in media and communication studies to our understanding of media industries, democracy and digital cultures.