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**Call for Papers for an Interdisciplinary Conference on Nostalgia in
Contemporary Culture**

** University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark**

(in association with the University of Oulu and Linnaeus University)

** 4-5 June 2018**

** **

Funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils for the
Humanities and the Social Sciences (NOS-HS)

** **

**Keynote Speakers:** Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware & Laura
Marcus, Goldsmiths' Professor of English at the University of Oxford

In 1953 L. P. Hartley wrote that "the past is a foreign country: they do
things differently there" and this claim resonates even more strongly
today than it did in the twentieth century. We live in societies
oriented towards the now and the tomorrow, in a world obsessed with a
complex and protean present seemingly impervious to historical
continuity. The many tomorrows inherent in every new technology,
product, and digitally mediated event drive us further away from our
collective histories. Personal, national, and even international
histories seem irrelevant in an age in which restless flows of people
move alongside information, products, ideas, and capital across
boundaries of all sorts.

Yet despite this push into the future, our present seems stubbornly
rooted in a past which has now been dying for a very long time. Rather
than moving forward, we seem to be perpetually falling backwards both
politically, through the re-ignition of history's seemingly buried
fires, and culturally through the attempts of cultural production and
consumption to reinterpret, reuse, the forms and artefacts of previous
eras. The past, then, may not be a foreign country, but our inescapable
homeland, the place from which we attempt to emigrate but return to as
if by irresistible attraction.

This sort of nostalgic remembrance can be seen as a bitter combination
of entropy and teleology, but nostalgia is also, as Svetlana Boym wrote,
"rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and
progress." Nostalgia can be seen as a romantic inclination towards the
past; it might seem irrational, immature, and regressive, but our
emotional connections to our own biographies, as well as a collective
solidarity with our childhoods, traditions, imaginations, anticipations
and dreams may also be a rational response to modern instability.
Nostalgia thus appears increasingly to be a modality of its own with
major potential for understanding how our *now* is shaped by our *then*,
both individually and collectively, and it is this interaction of the
present and the past through various forms of cultural production that
this conference seeks to explore.

**We welcome proposals dealing with any aspect of nostalgia in
contemporary cultural production**, but are especially interested in
proposals that intersect with four main areas of research:

- Memory, Affect, Subjectivity
- Nostalgia and Empire
- Migration and Exile
- The Anthropocene, the Post-human, and Utopian-Dystopian Imaginaries

**Please submit 200-300 word abstracts to Eric Sandberg
(**[**eric.sandberg@oulu.fi**](mailto:eric.sandberg@oulu.fi)**), Niklas
Salmose (**[**niklas.salmose@lnu.se**](mailto:niklas.salmose@lnu.se)**),
and Rune Graulund (**[**graulund@sdu.dk**](mailto:graulund@sdu.dk)**) by
December 31 2017.**

For more information about the project, please see
[http://www.oulu.fi/nostalgia/](http://www.oulu.fi/nostalgia/){target="_blank"}.

 

 

**Please submit 200-300 word abstracts to Eric Sandberg
(**[**eric.sandberg@oulu.fi**](mailto:eric.sandberg@oulu.fi)**), Niklas
Salmose (**[**niklas.salmose@lnu.se**](mailto:niklas.salmose@lnu.se)**),
and Rune Graulund (**[**graulund@sdu.dk**](mailto:graulund@sdu.dk)**) by
December 31 2017.**


Call for Papers for an Interdisciplinary Conference on Nostalgia in Contemporary Culture


 University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

(in association with the University of Oulu and Linnaeus University)

 4-5 June 2018



Funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and the Social Sciences (NOS-HS)

CfP: Conference &#8220;Nostalgia in Contemporary Culture&#8221;. June 4-5, 2018 @ University of Southern Denmark, Odense, DK. Deadline: Dec 31, 2017.

Digital embeddedness (Markham, 2017) is increasingly shaping how we
experience our social lives. At the same time, as all levels of culture
and society are shaped by new technological advancements online that
lead to new forms of mediatization, the ways and contexts in which
digital media are integrated into communicative structures are becoming
more diversified and -- at the same time -- globalized. Likewise,
mediatization is directly linked to modernity as new technologies
permeate everyday life at the personal, social and global level
(Hjarvard, 2008). Global flows of information are regarded as a
fundamental driving force and an integral part of everyday life
(Livingstone, 2009). Rapid developments in media technologies engender
global mediatization processes within overlapping, micro, meso and macro
levels (Döveling & Harju, 2017).

In this context, mediatization research has evolved into a highly
beneficial meta-perspective (Krotz, 2007; 2017) of communication and
media science (Lundby, 2014; Couldry & Hepp, 2013). The challenge that
mediatization research nowadays faces is grasping the rapidly developing
online communication and integrate this into mediatization research, at
the same time taking the shift of cultural boundaries in comparative
studies into account.

This GLOBAL MEDIATIZATION CONFERENCE will tackle these issues and
invites abstracts on research investigating the international
perspective on mediatization.

Vital questions are:

- How can we conceptualize global mediatization in the digital age?
- How has digital communication changed mediatized social behavior and
  vice versa?
- How does the global dimension influence local practices and vice
  versa?
- How does globally mediatized communication affect individuals, groups
  (e.g. religious groups) and society? How do different cultures affect
  globally mediatized communication?
- What insight do we gain from a culturally and internationally
  comparative focus?
- How are visuals used globally, e.g. after terrorist attacks?
- What role do emotions and affective practices play?
- Which methods do we have to grasp globalized mediatization online?
  Which time-frame in research should be chosen and what methodological
  challenges do we need to tackle?

By analyzing the extent to which people actively participate with new
media technologies, we can grasp the multifaceted interrelations of new
globally evolving media-technological developments, provide insight into
usability, psychology in the context of user interfaces, virtual
reality, sentiment analysis as well as the sociological analysis of the
digital of everyday life.

This conference thus invites scholars from wide international and
interdisciplinary fields to examine one of the predominant queries
concerning humans in today's society and aims to provide insight and
understanding into current psychological, cultural, sociological,
political and media technological developments and concerns that relate
to social as well as political and technological challenges we face. The
conference will shed light into factors influencing humans in the
digital age from a long-term and global perspective. Analytical
perspectives as well are empirical studies are welcome. An international
plenary discussion will illuminate the challenges we face regarding
globally mediatized communication.

**We invite abstracts (300-400 words) and panel submissions (3-4
abstracts, each 150 words).** The conference will lead to a high ranked
peer-reviewed publication. We offer a specially reduced fee and special
accommodation for doctoral students.

###### Confirmed key note speakers

- STIG HJARVARD, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN, DENMARK
- FRIEDRICH KROTZ, UNIVERSITY OF BREMEN, GERMANY

###### Contact

Katrin Döveling --
[katrin.doeveling@aau.at](mailto:katrin.doeveling@aau.at){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"}

Organizational Team: Katrin Döveling, Sarah Kohler, Christina Farcher

Conference organizers contact and submission to
[GMR@aau.at](mailto:GMR@aau.at){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"}

Location: Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria

Website will be launched soon!

###### Dates:

- Conference Dates: April 19th -- April 21st, 2018
- Submission of Abstracts (300-400 words) & Panels (3-4 abstracts 150
  words) Nov. 15th, 2017
- Submission Feedback: Dec. 15th, 2017


Digital embeddedness (Markham, 2017) is increasingly shaping how we experience our social lives. At the same time, as all levels of culture and society are shaped by new technological advancements online that lead to new forms of mediatization, the ways and contexts in which digital media are integrated into communicative structures are becoming more diversified and – at the same time – globalized.

CfP: Conference &#8220;Global Mediatization Research and Technology&#8221; Apr 19-21, 2018 @Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria. Deadline: Nov 15, 2017.

David Levente Palatinus

In her most recent blog, Elke Weissmann pointed out a peculiar characteristic of her own television viewing experiences – one that is presumably shared by a wide range of audiences.

WHAT DOES TELEVISION WANT? ON AFFECT AND PARTICIPATION

**Digital Violence: A Symposium. Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge,
United Kingdom**

**Saturday, November 4^th^ 2017**

** **

**Keynote Speakers:**

- **Caetlin Benson-Allott (Georgetown University)**
- **Eugenia Siapera & Debbie Ging (Dublin City University)**

We live in an age where images of violence and violent exchanges
proliferate and spread with unprecedented speed across multiple
platforms. Graphic and disturbing images of violence---from viral videos
of rape exchanged on Whatsapp, to the live streaming of fatal shootings
on Facebook and Periscope---have become a staple of our digital
condition. Similarly, resurgent forms of racialized, misogynistic, and
homophobic violence are routinely documented, decried, or simply
shrugged off as the 'new normal' of contemporary media culture.

While much attention is paid to the content of such encounters, and
alarms sounded about the nature of our access and exposure to them, less
concerted critical effort has been directed towards thinking
specifically about how the technological affordances of networked media
feed into and amplify this culture of violence. And yet, as Lisa
Nakamura reminds us in relation to the viral racism that abounds on
post-digital platforms, digital violence is always both 'a product and a
process': the very real impact of violence in a digital age needs
therefore to be traced through the often obscure, invisible, or simply
mundane operations that both produce and sustain it (Nakamura 2014:
260). Following on from Wendy Chun's more recent contention that 'our
media matter most when they seem not to matter at all,' how might we
re-frame our understanding of violence as inhering in (banal and often
unconscious) *habits*, in contrast to more common-sense notions of
violence as a spectacular affective disruption of the status quo (Chun
2016: 1; 13)?

This one-day symposium on Digital Violence seeks to theorize both the
*concrete forms* of violence that proliferate and spread through our
networked screens, and the *complex processes* that structure violence
in a post-digital attention ecology. What are the social and cultural
logics that underpin everyday instances of violence? In what specific
ways have these cultural understandings been shaped by technological
processes of mediation? Similarly, there is a vital need for scholars to
identify uses of media, which might expose, critique, or appropriate
violence in its various forms. What critical or creative practices of
archiving, excavation, and uncovering are needed to unearth and engage
violence in a digital age?

Possible topics and questions may include (but are not limited to):

- How are specific instances of violence captured, made visible, and/or
  obscured through the use of hashtags, such as \#black lives matter,
  \#notaskingforit, \#WhyIStayed?
- What is the relationship between race, new technologies and violence?
  What critical methodologies might enable us to evaluate 'how racism
  and antiblackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances
  of our present order' (Browne 2015: 9)?
- How has the emergent affect and attention ecology of social media
  impacted on the 'resurgent forms of political violence' in the era of
  Trump? (Andrejevic 2016).
- In what ways do social media platforms encourage 'digital complicity'
  with institutionalized forms of violence? (Kuntsman and Stein 2015).
- What role do social media and other digital platforms play in
  extending, countering, or buffering the 'violent or negative affective
  states produced by an ever-threatening world' (Grusin 2010: 112).
- What impact do the micro-temporalities and speeds of digital
  technologies and infrastructures have on the ways in which we
  understand and respond to violence and its relation to both human and
  non-human agents? (Nixon 2011; Parikka 2016).
- How do users of key platforms engage with and respond to images of
  violence? How are affective responses to violence solicited and
  conditioned by the affordances of such platforms? And what is the
  potential 'political utility' of a 'social media novelty' such as
  Facebook Live (Benson-Allott 2016)?
- How has digital feminist activism sought to challenge dominant
  cultural beliefs about violence and rape culture as 'a fact of life'
  (Phipps et al. 2017)? What 'new connections' might be enabled by
  particular uses of social media platforms and other examples of
  digital mediation (Keller, Mendes & Ringrose 2016)?

Conference Organisers: Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall

Please send a 300-word abstract and a brief bio to
[Tanya.Horeck@anglia.ac.uk](mailto:Tanya.Horeck@anglia.ac.uk){target="_blank"}
by 31 July 2017.

Sponsored by the Anglia Research Centre in Media & Culture:
[www.arcresearch.org.uk](http://www.arcresearch.org.uk/){target="_blank"}


Digital Violence: A Symposium. Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom


 Saturday, November 4
 
 th
 
 2017




 Keynote Speakers:


 Caetlin Benson-Allott (Georgetown University)


 Eugenia Siapera &amp;

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

CfP: Conference “Nostalgia in Contemporary Culture”. June 4-5, 2018 @ University of Southern Denmark, Odense, DK. Deadline: Dec 31, 2017.

CfP: Conference “Global Mediatization Research and Technology” Apr 19-21, 2018 @Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria. Deadline: Nov 15, 2017.

WHAT DOES TELEVISION WANT? ON AFFECT AND PARTICIPATION

CfP: “Digital Violence” symposium, Nov 4, 2017 @Anglia Ruskin University, UK. Deadline: July 31, 2017.