*CFP* "MACHINE VISION IN CONTEXT: POLITICS AND PRACTICES OF COMPUTATIONAL SEEING", SPECIAL ISSUE, PHOTOGRAPHIES JOURNAL

This special issue will bring together interdisciplinary scholarship that engages critically with the evolving, recursive interrelations between machine vision and photography.

The heightened capacities of machines to ‘see’ and visually categorize the world have been the subject of numerous recent journalistic exposés and public outcry. Whether critiquing the role that machine vision plays in efforts to track, detain, and penalize targeted communities, or charting the incorporation of similar technologies into urban infrastructures, self-driving cars and ‘smart’ appliances, there is a growing awareness that it is reshaping what is seen and what counts as seeing. Online, recognition algorithms increasingly automate the tasks of tagging, categorizing and extracting meaning from the “unmanageable and unassimilable” accumulation of images circulating across networked environments (Henning 2018). Within this context of volume, scale, and distributed production, the photographic image appears to have receded from the realm of human perception (Zylinska 2017), working instead as an ‘operative’ agent (Hoelzl & Marie 2015) that drives and draws together the constellation of hard and soft platforms that comprise the contemporary mediascape (Dvořák and Parikka 2021; Mackenzie & Munster 2019). Images and their audiences are being ‘put to work,’ as the solicitation and generation of metadata as well as the non-human recognition of pixel- and user-based patterns facilitates the improvement and expansion of computerized vision (Sluis 2020).

*CFP* "FIGHTING BOXING'S NARRATIVES", BOOK CHAPTER

Boxing is understood through a set of pervasive and powerful narratives that are insufficiently challenged in popular and academic encounters with the sport. This volume invites a multidisciplinary approach to respond to this dilemma. Analysing and fighting the narratives through which the sport of boxing is understood is crucial on account of the relationship between these stories and the formation of an individual’s narrative identity. In 1992, ethnographer, Loïc Wacquant, outlined the narrative misconceptions associated with boxing, wherein boxers are understood as: rugged, near-illiterate young/men/who, raised in broken homes and deprivation, manage single-handedly to elevate themselves from the gutter to fame and fortune, parlaying their anger at the world and sadomasochistic craving for violence into million-dollar purses, save for those who, ruthlessly exploited by callous managers and promoters alike, end up on the dole with broken bones and hearts. (Wacquant 1992, p. 222).

Almost three decades later, Crews and Lennox (2020) argued that these misconceptions remain and it is through the lens of these narrative myths that boxing is understood in the public press and scholarly studies. The narrative myths supporting boxing matter because they shape the types of narrative identities available to those who engage with boxing. They determine the value and stigma associated with the sport and its participants, and importantly, determine who is represented in the stories told about boxing, in the identity of the boxer. 

*CFP* CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS, MENSTRUATION RESEARCH NETWORK

In collaboration with the Menstruation Research Network, this one-day event at the University of Sheffield will focus on media narratives about menstruation and related topics. It will bring together researchers in the fields of journalism and media studies, individual advocates, and representatives from NGOs. The event will take place at the University of Sheffield on 22nd October 2021, but this will be changed to an online format if necessary.

We are delighted to announce that our keynote speaker will be Annika Waheed. Annika is a non-clinical lecturer for Barts Health Trust in London and suffers from Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, a condition that she describes as ‘PMS’s woefully misunderstood Satanic sibling’. She advocates, educates, and raises awareness via her Instagram page on which she candidly records her journey living with PMDD.

The day will also include 15-minute papers and workshops. Papers/workshop sessions are free to explore any type of media (such as blogs, zines, podcasts, apps, websites, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, newspapers, magazines, radio, cinema).

*CFP* CALL FOR ARTICLES, SECOND ISSUE, QUALITATIVE HEALTH COMMUNICATION

Qualitative Health Communication (QHC), is a new, no-fee, open access online journal dedicated to publishing articles employing qualitative methods to investigate, improve and innovate health communication.

We are calling for submissions to QHC’s second issue (to be published in July 2022) and subsequent issues via the journal's website. Detailed instructions for authors can also be found on the website. This is a general call for submission not tied to a special issue topic. All submissions within scope of QHC are welcome. Submission from researchers at any stage of their career is encouraged. All submissions will be peer-reviewed: initial screening in-house followed by external peer-review. There are no article submission or processing fees. Accepted articles will be available online free of charge.

The first issue of Qualitative Health Communication (QHC) will be published in January 2022 featuring contributions by renowned health communication researchers. Topics include COVID-19 communication, communication in antenatal group consultations, paediatric palliative care, surgeon-patient consultations, communication in patient information leaflets and forensic assessment reports and co-construction of experiential knowledge.

*CFP* "THERAPEUTIC NARRATIVES? PROCESSES AND EFFECTS OF EUDAIMONIC ENTERTAINMENT", ONLINE SYMPOSIUM

Therapeutic Narratives? Processes and Effects of Eudaimonic Entertainment

Online Symposium

8-9 July 2021

 

The last decade has seen a surge in research on eudaimonic entertainment, or entertainment that provides viewers with meaning and insight into human life. In this research area, several processes and effects of eudaimonic entertainment have been studied, such as mixed affect, need satisfaction and well-being. In addition, it has been suggested that eudaimonic entertainment can be beneficial to viewers’ health and that it may contribute to being able to cope with difficult issues and situations. For instance, tragic portrayals of characters’ death may enable viewers to better deal with their own fear of death.

Also, portrayals of characters showing virtues like love and kindness may motivate viewers to be kinder to others. Potential underlying processes of these effects have been suggested, such as the feeling of being moved and self-reflection. The aim of this symposium is to discuss the benefits viewers may gain from eudaimonic entertainment and the processes that facilitate these effects. Proposals for presentations of empirical results as well as theoretical frameworks are invited.

*CFP* "MEDICAL CULTURE IN EAST ASIAN CINEMA AND MEDIA", EDITED VOLUME

The current COVID-19 global pandemic has inspired renewed attention to the intersection between public health and mass media. With constant media updates of case counts, healthcare guidelines, and preventive strategies, among other public health communications, the boundaries of various imagined communities have been newly established or strongly reinforced. The complex cultural and geopolitical region of East Asia, in particular, has become a center of media attention, following wide circulation of essentialized cultural norms (such as collectivity and uniformity), stereotypical accounts of hygiene habits, racialized discourses surrounding the East Asian bodies, and techno-orientalist narratives of East Asian use of digital means for disease tracing and control. 

Both personal and public health outcomes thus have become inextricably intertwined with processes of representation and (re)mediation, while the pandemic itself has become a media event inseparable from various audiovisual forms. We are therefore living a historical moment that demands reflection on the precarious socio-political structures revealed through audiovisual media, including health care access and its relation to class, gender, and ethnic hierarchies.

*CFP* "PHARMACOLOGIES OF MEDIA", SPECIAL ISSUE, MEDIA THEORY JOURNAL

Are media doing us more harm than good? This question has shadowed accounts of new technologies for millennia, from the advent of writing right through to the emergence of social media. Beginning with Plato’s reflections on writing’s effects on memory, and under the influence of work by philosophers like Jacques Derrida (1981) and Bernard Stiegler (2011), media scholars often explore this question using the concept of the pharmakon.

In its Platonic sense, the pharmakon is both a remedy and a poison, or something that can both heal and harm. To describe media as pharmacological is to acknowledge that they can have both positive and negative effects. But this concept is difficult to disentangle from its medical origins. The pharmakon is a substance, a drug or a medicine, that might be intoxicating or beneficial. Like drugs, this double capacity is not inherently value-laden, or good and/or bad, but is a function of how the media operate. Like drugs, this capacity informs how media operate on, extend, or curtail our capacity to sense, think, or act. But here the analogy falls apart. Media and drugs address different domains of the body and have distinct cultures. If this analogy can only stretch so far, what are we to make of the concept of the pharmakon today?

*CFP* "POLITICAL EVILS: THE IRON CURTAIN AND ITS LEGACIES", AN INCLUSIVE INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE

Political Evils: The Iron Curtain and its Legacies

An Inclusive Interdisciplinary Conference

Sunday 14th March 2021 - Monday 15th March 2021

Lisbon, Portugal

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

Winston Churchill, 5 March 1946

The ‘iron curtain’ has come to be associated with a host of social, political and cultural evils perpetrated by the Soviet-backed Communist regimes that ruled countries in central and eastern Europe from the end of the Second World War until the early 1990s. Behind the iron curtain, state control over every aspect of daily life gave rise to corruption, oppression, deprivation, ethnic conflict, censorship, and general atmosphere of isolation from western democracies and a deep paranoia about western hegemony. 

*CFP* "THE END OF LIFE EXPERIENCE", 3RD GLOBAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE

The End of Life Experience

3rd Global Interdisciplinary Conference

Friday 12th March 2021 - Saturday 13th March 2021

Lisbon, Portugal

This global inclusive interdisciplinary conference explores dying and death and the ways culture impacts care for the dying, the overall experience of dying and ways the dead are remembered. Over the past four decades, scholarship in thanatology and palliative care has increased dramatically. Our conversations seek a broad array of perspectives that explore, analyse, and/or interpret the myriad interrelations and interactions that exist between death and culture. Culture not only presents and portrays ideas about â??a good deathâ? and norms that seek to achieve it, it also operates as both a vehicle and medium through which meaning about death is communicated and understood. Sadly, too, culture sometimes facilitates death through violence.

A key emphasis in this year's conference will be an exploration of the connections between health care systems, caregivers, and matters of public policy that serve those at the end-of-life. To that end, we will address questions such as:

*CFP* "NOSTALGIA", 2ND GLOBAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE

Nostalgia

2nd Global Interdisciplinary Conference

Friday 12th March 2021 - Saturday 13th Martch 2021

Lisbon, Portugal

We have all probably had conversations with aged relatives and friends resulting in the oft repeated words “I remember when…”, spoken either as an illumination of the progress of the present in comparison to seeming simplicity of the past or a wistful longing for the past to be alive again in the midst of the present. Often focused on differences between generations and triggered by specific events and objects, there is an overpowering sense that things are not what they used to be. This can be a positive experience, for example, being impressed at technological progress, or conversely confusingly negative, for example, the sense of frustration with the same technology and a hankering for times when things were perceived to be much simpler and easier. Nostalgia is an extremely powerful feeling; it can in equal measure lift us up, make us feel safe, create fond memories and/or it can bring us down, make us feel intensely isolated, lonely, left behind and depressed. There is nostalgia for things that are no longer with us and people who are no longer with us (individually and collectively). There is the sense that things that are out of place – and not only out of place but also out of time. It can be both missing things and the missing of things. Yet it can also be a real and quite intense force which forms the present and informs the future.

*CFP* "POSTHUMAN PATHOGENESIS: VIRUS, DISEASE AND EPIDEMIOLOGY IN LITERATURE, FILM AND MEDIA", EDITED VOLUME

Since the Age of Enlightenment, which glorified reason and empirical observation as the nexus for human knowledge, and the Industrial Revolution, which brought about robust technological changes, science and scientific thinking have been increasingly placed above everything else. But from a humanities perspective, fiction has always moved one step ahead of science, dreaming of the impossible first. Science-fiction and speculative fiction, in both utopian and dystopian forms, are concrete examples of this. From Mary Shelley to Jules Verne, George Orwell, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Margaret Atwood, many authors explored what the future holds for the world in their narratives of the ‘back-then’ unimaginable. Following a similar path to the literary examples, film industry and new media genres such as music videos, computer and mobile games, and advertisements have come to shape our imagination and paved the way for the future technologies, at least before they came true.

Germs, bacterial and viral infections, and subsequent pandemics are no exception to the meeting point of science, technology, and fiction. They are, to adopt and evolve Donna Haraway’s metaphor of the cyborg, a blend of myth and social reality. Bending the boundaries between life and death, they are the powerholders in Achilles Mbembe’s “necropolitics,” calling to mind Jacques Derrida’s words in his exploration of the animal question: “The dead-alive viruses, undecidably between life and death, between animal and vegetal, that come back from everywhere to haunt and obsess my writing” (“The Animal that Therefore I am” 406).

*CFP* “RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY, AND HEALTH”, BOOK CHAPTERS, ROUTLEDGE

While the context of the ‘chronic’ condition is most well known as medical and treatment oriented, this collection will reflect on chronic health and wellness beyond the diagnosis of chronic medical conditions. The authors will bring a critical lens for the exploration of cultural and daily experiences of various forms of chronic conditions and wellness in relation to practices of spirituality and faith. 

Chronicity as a framework, with a focus on the meaning-centered aspects of illness experiences over time, will set the stage for this collection, considering that chronic conditions draw together developed and developing countries, the global North and South, East or West. 

This inter- and transdisciplinary collection invites contributors and leading scholars in the cultural and social sciences, medical professionals, psychotherapists, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, nurses, and practitioners of complementary and alternative across the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, health education, and social work to understand, rethink, and transform spiritual and faith-based striving in health care. We take as our theoretical point of departure the phenomenological and hermeneutic, meaning-making traditions, as the co-authors share a concern for the manifold struggles that abound amidst living with and management of chronic conditions. 

*CFP* "DIAGNOSING HISTORY: MEDICINE IN TELEVISION COSTUME DRAMAS", EDITED COLLECTION

There has been a long relationship between television and medicine: some of the small screen’s most popular shows, on both sides of the Atlantic, have been medical in focus, from hospital-set dramas like ER to reality TV shows and docudramas like One Born Every Minute. This fascination with doctors, hospitals and bodies is also shared by period drama television, but scholarship has paid little attention to this intersection/relationship. Recent period dramas including The Knick, Mercy Street, and Charite, for example, use the hospital setting familiar from older shows like Bramwell, to address larger themes about the professionalization of medicine, medical innovations and failures, and the gender politics that surround the profession. Dramas like Call the Midwife document the progress of the NHS and female reproductive health while also engaging in contemporary debates about contraception, abortion, and disability. In addition, medical-driven narratives abound in almost every period drama on our screens today: war-induced mental and physical trauma in Peaky Blinders; Spanish ‘flu in The Village; gay conversion plotlines in A Place to Call Home; bodily and facial disfigurement in Home Fires; medical experimentation and monstrosity in Penny Dreadful and Frankenstein Chronicles; nursing as a vehicle of female emancipation in The Crimson Field and Morocco: Love in Times of War; and all of the above and many more in Downton Abbey, whose most famous plotlines are medical in nature.

*CFP* "DIAGNOSING HISTORY: MEDICINE IN TELEVISION COSTUME DRAMA", EDITED COLLECTION

There has been a long relationship between television and medicine: some of the small screen’s most popular shows, on both sides of the Atlantic, have been medical in focus, from hospital-set dramas like ER to reality TV shows and docudramas like One Born Every Minute. This fascination with doctors, hospitals and bodies is also shared by period drama television, but scholarship has paid little attention to this intersection/relationship. Recent period dramas including The Knick, Mercy Street, and Charite, for example, use the hospital setting familiar from older shows like Bramwell, to address larger themes about the professionalization of medicine, medical innovations and failures, and the gender politics that surround the profession. Dramas like Call the Midwife document the progress of the NHS and female reproductive health while also engaging in contemporary debates about contraception, abortion, and disability. In addition, medical-driven narratives abound in almost every period drama on our screens today: war-induced mental and physical trauma in Peaky Blinders; Spanish ‘flu in The Village; gay conversion plotlines in A Place to Call Home; bodily and facial disfigurement in Home Fires; medical experimentation and monstrosity in Penny Dreadful and Frankenstein Chronicles; nursing as a vehicle of female emancipation in The Crimson Field and Morocco: Love in Times of War; and all of the above and many more in Downton Abbey, whose most famous plotlines are medical in nature.