"Beneath the University, the Commons"

Looks A-M-A-Z-I-N-G...

---

"Beneath the University, the Commons"
A conference at the University of Minnesota
April 8-11, 2010

// Antioch 05.08 // Rome 10.08 // Athens 12.08 // New York City 12.08 //
Helsinki 03.09 // Zagreb 05.09 // Heidelberg 06.09 // London 06.09 //Santa
Cruz 09.09//…

Seemingly discrete struggles over the conditions of university life have erupted around the world within the past year. These struggles share certain commonalities: outrage over precarious and exploitative conditions, the occupation of university spaces, and goals of reclaiming education from state and corporate interests. It is becoming increasingly apparent that recent struggles over the university are not merely discrete events. They express a wider collective desire for direct control over the means of production and forms of life; a desire to create relationships of learning, collaboration, and innovation beyond the university’s attempts to quantify
and discipline them.

Although the modern university has served the interests of the state and capital since its inception, the past thirty years have witnessed tightened ties with corporate, financial, and geopolitical interests. The subsumption of higher education under capital-driven business models has intensified the expropriation of the products of cooperative labor. With the proliferation of student-consumer and scholar-manager subjectivities, we increasingly find ourselves uncomfortably and often unwittingly occupying the role of active participants in these trends. As the global struggles over the past year have illustrated, however, opposition to these mechanisms of capture is mounting, as are creative strategies for alternatives and exodus. Struggles against the corporate university are linking up across borders; the slogan of the International Student Movement, “One World – One Struggle : Education is Not for Sale,” and the slogan of the Anomalous Wave, “We Won’t Pay for Your Crisis,” appear in actions across Europe, the Americas, and South Asia.

“Beneath the University, the Commons” builds on the work accomplished by activists, organizers, artists, and academics at the “Re-thinking” and “Re-working” the University Conferences of 2008 and 2009 (www.reworkingtheu.org), while expanding the scope of our discussions and bringing together more international scholars in order to address an increasingly volatile global situation. Our goal is to aggregate and accelerate our knowledge of university conditions and our collective acts of resistance to them, including alternative forms of engaging with each other and with the world. To this end, the 2010 conference will draw together a diverse set of people committed to exploring how we can understand, create, and experiment with the commons beneath the university. Our questions include but are not limited to:

//How do we enact and sustain occupations of the university in the exceptional times and spaces of the everyday?

//How do we generate an international “undercommons,” maintaining subversive positions as actors within, rather than of, the spaces of the university?

//How can unionization projects and occupation struggles learn from and collaborate with one another?

//How do we negotiate the line between stability and revolutionary effectiveness?

//How do we open up sustainable and livable spaces for radical research, education, and scholarship without being subsumed by the publish-or-perish disciplinary apparatus?

//How can we collaboratively map and share research, information, tactics, and cultures?

//In recognition that our conditions are a part of a larger set of global occupations and injustices, how do we link with social movements outside of and across the university?

This four-day event will consist of two days of conference sessions bracketed by two days of workshops, writing collaborations, skill shares, and plenty of time for sustained conversations among participants. We are accepting proposals both for formal papers and for non-conventional forms of participation.

-- If you would like to present a paper, please submit an abstract and a CV or brief biographical statement.

-- If you would like to participate in another way (by leading a workshop, facilitating a roundtable, presenting media, etc), please submit a brief (1-2 pages) description of the proposed activity and include what kind of resources we would need to provide, along with a CV or brief biographical statement.

All proposals should be addressed to conference@beneaththeu.org, and must be received by January 1, 2010.

CFP: Gilbert Simondon Conference

Gilbert Simondon: Transduction, Translation, Transformation
A Two-Day International Conference at the American University of Paris
May 27-28, 2010
Paris, France

In recent years, the work of Gilbert Simondon has received greater attention both in France and internationally following the re-publication of his work over the past decade. The importance of Simondon’s thought to the work of French philosophers including Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler has become increasingly discussed and analysed both in France and in the English-speaking world. At the same time, Simondon’s work has been taken up on its own terms, recognized for the unique contributions that he made to the philosophy of technology, phenomenology and social philosophy. Forthcoming translations of his major works into English will surely instigate a long-overdue introduction of his work within a much broader international community of scholars.

We are currently accepting submissions that examine how Simondon’s work has intersected with other projects in critical theory, cultural studies, contemporary social theory and beyond. Thus, in keeping with the theme of “transduction, translation and transformation,” we are not looking for papers that merely rehearse the writings of Simondon, but projects that transform and translate his concepts and thoughts into new areas of work and new forms of engagement. We equally invite participation from experts on Simondon's work, as well as those interested in discovering it for the first time.

Confirmed Keynote: Mark Hansen (Duke University)

Possible presentations could engage with Simondon's work connected with various themes including:

- Media, technology and technics;
- Information, its history and futures;
- Theories and practices of individuation and affect;
- Bio-social ontologies;
- Post-representational philosophy;
- Phenomenology and materialism;
- Systems Theory;
- Simondon and other thinkers (Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, Baudrillard,
Stielger, Stengers...)

The conference format will primarily consist of paper presentations, roundtable discussions and keynotes, but interested participants are welcome to propose alternative forms of involvement. Those interested in participating are asked to submit at 300 word abstract, outlining the subject of their contribution. Please send these abstracts to the attention of the conference organizers by January 30th, 2010 via email to the address, simondon.conference@gmail.com. Accepted proposals will be considered for inclusion in a future publication drawn from the conference proceedings.

Conference Organizers: Bernard Geoghegan (Northwestern University, USA), Mark Hayward (American University of Paris, France), and Robert Mitchell (Duke University, USA)

Deleuze: Ethics & politics conference CFP

Looks great...

---

Call for Papers: "Deleuze: Ethics and Politics"

4th Biennial Philosophy and Literature Conference at Purdue University
April 9-10, 2010
Purdue University, West Lafayette

Deadline for Paper Submission:
January 15, 2010

The philosopher Michel Serres once described Gilles Deleuze as “an excellent example of the dynamic movement of free and inventive thinking.” Without a doubt, Deleuze was one of the most singular and prolific philosophers of the 20th century. It is no surprise then, that the impact of Deleuze’s thought continues to reverberate throughout a host of diverse disciplines including Philosophy, Literature, Political Theory, Law, Visual Arts, Film Studies, and Education. With recognition of Deleuze’s influence in these various fields, and in the spirit of Serres’ assessment, this conference seeks to motivate an exploration of Deleuze’s inventive thinking in the particular areas of politics and ethics.

Thus, this conference will serve as a platform, bringing together graduate students and faculty interested in engaging, developing, or critically examining the political and ethical dimensions of Deleuze’s work. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: immanent vs. transcendent criteria in ethics, political theory, law and jurisprudence; the role of the State in relation to capitalism; the possibility of social forms of organization radically exterior to the State forms; the positive or productive function of desire as a creative force directly invested in the social field; the problem of micro-fascism with respect to individual and collective processes of subjectivation; the forms of resistance enabled by minor literature and other processes of becoming-minor; the conception of cartography as a critical and transformative social analytic of power relations. This two-day conference will consist of four panels, each with three to four accepted graduate students presenting, three keynote addresses, and a wine and cheese reception.

Keynote Speakers
We will host three preeminent Deleuze scholars as keynote speakers: Daniel Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky, from Purdue University, and Eugene Holland, from Ohio State University. Dr. Smith is known for national and international projects including translations of Deleuze and Klossowski and several works on Deleuze leading up to the forthcoming publication of his book on Deleuze’s philosophical system. Dr. Holland specializes in social theory and modern French literature, history, and culture. He has published widely including a 1999 volume on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and a forthcoming book on Nomad Citizenship. Dr. Plotnitsky has contributed numerous publications on Deleuze and on the topics of science, literature, and philosophy. He is currently working on a book entitled Space-Time-Matter-Thought: Non-Euclideanism from Riemann and Deleuze, and Beyond.

Conference Eligibility and Submission Process
We welcome submissions from graduate students of any discipline working on the political or ethical facets of Deleuze’s philosophy. Submissions will be accepted via email at phil-lit-conference@purdue.edu. The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2010. Authors should attach both the paper and an abstract (500 word limit) as a Word document. The author’s name and affiliation should be omitted from the body of the paper. In addition, the author should include the text of the abstract in the body of the message. Be sure to include the following information in the email: full name, departmental affiliation, degree program, and the title of your paper. Accepted authors will receive notification no later than February 15, 2010.

Contact Information
For updates, please visit http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/idis/phil-lit/conference/. All additional questions can be directed to Erin Kealey or Rocky Clancy via email at: phil-lit-conference@purdue.edu.

Deleuze & activism conference

DELEUZE AND ACTIVISM CONFERENCE

The Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, School of English, Communication & Philosophy in cooperation with Culture, Imagination and Practice Research Group, School of Social Sciences

CARDIFF UNIVERSITY, WALES
12-13 NOVEMBER, 2009

Post-identity - The political Deleuze - The Commons - Activism-s - Geo-activism - Micro-interventions

For more information, please contact Marcelo Svirsky: DELEUZE@CF.AC.UK

Speakers:

Keynote: Ian Buchanan (Cardiff ); Jeremy Gilbert (East London); Paul Patton (UNSW); Nathan Widder (Royal Holloway)

Ronnen Ben-Arie (AVIG, Israel/Palestine); Simone Bignall (UNSW); Hywel Bishop (Cardiff); Steven Brown (Leicester); Christoph Brunner (Montreal); John Cromby (Loughborough); Andrew Dornon (Southwestern); Brad Evans (Leeds); Jan L. Harris; Gašper Kralj (Radical Education Collective, Slovenia); Bryce Lease (Kent); Ioulia Mermigka (Athens); Keir Milburn (Leeds); Rodrigo Nunes (Turbulence); Karl Palmås (Chalmers, Sweden); Dimitris Papadopoulos (Cardiff); Ofer Parchev (Haifa); Bojana Piškur (Radical Education Collective, Slovenia); Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (Cardiff); Remy Robertson (Southwestern); Stevphen Shukaitis (Autonomedia, Essex); Sian Sullivan (Birkbeck); Laurent de Sutter (LSTS, Belgium); Marcelo Svirsky (Cardiff); Vidar Thorsteinsson (Reykjavik Academy)

For registration and programme, visit: WWW.CARDIFF.AC.UK/ENCAP/NEWSANDEVENTS

CFP -- "The Archive & Everyday Life" Conference

Call for Proposals:

“The Archive and Everyday Life” Conference
May 7-8, 2010
McMaster University

Proposals due 15 October 2009 to tayconf@mcmaster.ca

Confirmed Keynotes: Ann Cvetkovich (An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures), Angela Grauerholz (At Work and Play: A Web Experimentation), Ben Highmore (The Everyday Life Reader; Everyday Life and Cultural Theory), Michael O’Driscoll (The Event of theArchive)

This conference will bring together academics, advocates, artists, and other cultural workers to examine the intersecting fields of archive and everyday life theory. From Simmel through Mass Observation to contemporary Cultural Studies theorists, the objective of everyday life theory has been, as Ben Highmore writes, to “rescue the everyday from conventional habits of the mind…to attempt to register the everyday in all its complexities and contradictions.” Archive theory provides a means to explore these structures by “making the unfamiliar familiar,” hence opening the possibility of generating “new forms of critical practice.” The question of a politics of the archive is critical to the burgeoning field of archive theory. How do we begin to theorize the archive as a political apparatus? Can its effective democratization be measured by the participation of those who engage with both its constitution and its interpretation?

“Archive” is understood to cover a range of objects, from a museum’s collection to a personal photograph album, from a repository of a writer’s papers in a library to an artist’s installation of found objects. Regardless of its content, the archive works to contain, organize, represent, render intelligible, and produce narratives. The archive has often worked to legitimate the rule of those in power and to produce a historical narrative that presents class structure and power relations as both common-sense and inevitable. This function of the archive as a machine that produces History—telling us what is significant, valued, and worth preserving, and what isn’t—is enabled through an understanding of the archive as neutral and objective (and too banal and boring to be political!). The archive has long occupied a privileged space in affirmative culture, and as a result, the archive has been revered from afar and aestheticized, but not understood as a potential object of critical practice.

Can a dialogue between archive theory and everyday life theory work to “take revenge” on the archive (Cvetkovich)? If the archive works to produce historical narratives, can we seize the archive and its attendant collective consciousness as a tool for resistance in countering dominant History with resistant narratives? While the archive has worked to preserve a transcendental, “affirmative” form of culture, bringing everyday life theory into conversation with archive theory opens up the possibility of directing critical attention to both the wonders and drudgeries of the everyday. Archiving the everyday—revealing class structures and oppression on the basis of race and gender, rendering working and living conditions under global capitalism visible, audible, and intelligible—redirects us from our busyness and distractedness, and focuses our attention on that which has not been understood to be deserving of archiving. The archive provides the time and space to think through a collection of objects organized around particular set of interests. If the archive could grant us a space in which to examine everyday life, rather than sweeping it under the carpet as a trivial banality, we could begin to understand our conditions and develop the desire to change them.

How can we envision the archive as a site of ethics and/or politics? Does the archive simply represent a place to amass memory, or can it, following Benjamin, represent a site to make visible a history of the present, thus amassing fragments of the everyday, which can in turn be used to uproot the authority of the past to question the present? In short, what happens when we move beyond the archive as merely a collection and begin to theorize it as a site of constant renewal and struggle within which the past and present can come together? Furthermore, how then does the archive as an everyday practice allow us to understand or change our perception of temporality, memory, and this historical moment?

Areas of inquiry for submissions may include, but are not limited to, the following topics and questions:

• The archive both includes and excludes; it works to preserve while simultaneously doing violence. Are the acts of selection, collection, ordering, systematizing, and cataloguing inherently violent?
• The question of digitization: the internet as digital archive and the digitization of the physical archive. Digitizing the archive renders collections invisible and distant, yet increasingly searchable and quantifiable. Does the digitization of the archive reveal new ways of seeing persistent power structures? Or does it hide them?
• National and colonial archiving: questions of power and national identity.
• The utopian, radical potential of the archive as well as its dystopian possibilities.
• Indigenous modes of archiving.
• Visibility and pedagogy: while the archive often works to hide, conceal, and store away, it can also reveal and display that which otherwise remains invisible. Do barriers to access restrict this emancipatory function of the archive?
• Questions of collective memory and nostalgia (for Benjamin, a retreat to a place of comfort through nostalgia is not a political act).
• The archive as revisionist history.
• The archive as a form of surveillance.
• The role of reflexivity with respect to the manner in which the archive is constructed/produced/curated.
• Function of the narrative form for the archive: how does the way in which the archive reveals its own constructedness unravel the concept of the archive as “historical truth”?
• The future of the archive: preservation and collection look forwards as well as into the past. How should we understand the hermeneutic function of the archive and the struggle over its interpretation?
• The relationship between the archive and the archivist/archon.
• Mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in the archive: who speaks and who is spoken for?
• The affective relationship between the archive and the body.

Following the conference, we intend to publish an edited collection of essays based on the papers presented at the conference to facilitate the circulation of ideas in this exciting field of inquiry.

“The Archive and Everyday Life” Conference will take place 7-8 May, 2010, sponsored by the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (John Douglas Taylor Fund). The conference format will be diverse, including paper presentations, panels, round-table exchanges, artistic performances, and exhibitions. We encourage individual and collaborative paper and panel proposals from across the disciplines and from artists and community members.

Paper Submissions should include (1) contact information; (2) a 300-500 word abstract; and (3) a one page curriculum vitae or a brief bio.

Panel Proposals should include (1) a cover sheet with contact information for chair and each panelist; (2) a one-page rationale explaining the relevance of the panel to the theme of the conference; (3) a 300 word abstract for each proposed paper; and (4) a one page curriculum vitae for each presenter.

Please submit individual paper proposals or full panel proposals via e-mail attachment by October 15, 2009 to tayconf@mcmaster.ca with the subject line “Archive.” Attachments should be in .doc or .rtf formats. Submissions should be one document (i.e. include all required information in one attached document).

Conference organizing committee:
Mary O’Connor, Jennifer Pybus, and Sarah Blacker

CFP -- Canadian Journal of Media Studies

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES

CALL FOR PAPERS

2009 marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. “[I}t is common knowledge,” he wrote, “that the miniaturization and commercialization of machines is already changing the way learning is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited” (1984, org. 1979: 4). In 2010, "Connected Understanding" will be the theme of the Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities in Montreal (http://www.fedcan.virtuo.ca/congress2010/). The Canadian Journal of Media Studies announces a special issue on Media, Knowledge and the Network University edited by Bob Hanke, York University, and David Spencer, University of Western Ontario.

The massification and informationalization of the university has transformed not only the content of teaching and research but also disciplinary processes of knowledge production and the technological form of academic life and culture. The integration and normalization of ICT's raises many questions about the university, academic labour, scholarly communication and collaboration, and academic technoculture. In 1957, Marshall McLuhan invited us to reconsider the education process by announcing that, with the advent of television, the “classroom without walls” had arrived. A half a century later, we are working in the university without walls and the ICT “revolution” is over. In “Universities, wet, hard, and harder,” German media theorist Friedrich Kittler reviewed 800 years of university-based media history to observe that “universities have finally succeeded in forming once again a complete media system.” Yet media scholars have rarely chosen to study their own universities as media systems. This special issue of the CJMS is an invitation to reflexive, critical media studies. Established and emerging scholars are invited to address continuities and transformations in new media and the network university and to set the agenda for future study and debate.

Possible questions and areas of research and critical inquiry include:

• What is unthought, unrepresented and unquestioned in discussions of the public university and the ‘neoliberal turn,’ technologically-mediated post-secondary education, and institutional initiatives in the virtualization of the educational process?

• What is the impact of the cybernation of the university? What is happening in information technology (IT) infrastructure, planning and governance? What IT strategies are pursued by specific institutions in different jurisdictions? What is the role of IT professionals as intermediaries between IT industries, intermediating organizations, private-sector partners and the university? What is the faculty experience of ICTs, and IT “solutions,” services, and support?

• What are the networks of possibility and affordances of technology, and what are the obstacles and limits? the unintended, unanticipated consequences?

• What hybrid methodologies, research techniques and software enhance our capacity to map the wireless campus and network condition of the university?

• What philosophers of technology and politics are relevant to sharpening our thinking on the question of technology? What scholarly perspectives on invention, innovation and the process of emergence enable us to break the habit of instrumentalist thinking and discard the “tool” metaphor? How can we take technical artifacts, from small, portable technology to entire campus networks, out of their “black boxes” in order to study them? How does the technical substrate matter to our thinking? Our reading and writing of “texts”? Our notions of “research”? How is the university embedded in the network society and cognitive capitalism? What are the drivers of IT change in universities? What are the consequences of the disjuncture between the digital culture and practices outside the university and IT (planning, procurement/evaluation/implementation, support and services) inside universities?

• How can we move beyond user-centric approaches to Web 2.0 based software applications and learning management systems, peer-to-peer networks, and small tech in academic settings? In the new network culture, how can we grasp the relations between what is “given” and what is unlikely, surprising, unexpected and unrealized?

• How can we move beyond debates over “student centered” learning and faculty deskilling to new models of reskilling and organized research networks, technological literacy and technologies of the common? How can we articulate scholarly “collaboration” and student “engagement” with a politics of knowledge (commodified knowledge, open scholarship and knowledge within the social sciences and humanities, popular knowledge, indigenous knowledge, etc.) that will strengthen the public mission of the university after the recession? How can we turn away from the “knowledge economy” and towards knowledge cultures? What does the prototype of the Canadian Institute for Health Research’s Knowledge Broker Model portend for the social sciences and humanities?

We also invite investigations of:

• computerization, campus networking strategies, and ICT-related organizational change since the advent of distributed computing, the Internet and the WWW

• space, time, speed and rhythm in the network university

• the production and operativity of networks and archives, scholarly journals and portals, web-based learning environments and objects, research cyberinfrastructure, critical cyberpedagogy, technological literacy, copyright/left, intellectual property rights

• open access movement, open access research, open educational resources, open courseware, institutional repositories, ‘Do it Yourself’ education or edupunk

• tropes of factory, ecology, network, mobility, common

• articulations and destabilizations of oral/written, actual/virtual, bureaucratic records/institutional memory, off-line/on line, knowledge creation/information sharing, formal learning on campus/informal learning off campus, amateur/professional, artist/researcher

• ideology of convenience, ethos of performativity, immaterial academic labour, general intellect, circuits of knowledge and struggle

• technological “progress,”“knowledge economy,” knowledge “transfer” or “mobilization,” creativity, innovation, academic freedom, academic capitalism

• the coming network university, knowledge futures, ecoethical perspectives on the university’s inputs and outputs and the discourse of “sustainability”

Since intellectual innovation may be engendered at the intersections of disciplines, contributions are welcome from outside of Communication and traditions and trajectories of media studies outside of Canada. Solo or collaborative work that provides a comparative, international perspective on the network university in different countries is especially welcome.

Submission Guidelines

Authors should submit papers of about 25 pages (or 8000 words) in MLA style with abstract and keywords electronically to David Spencer, Editor, dspencer@uwo.ca. With the exception of the title page, please remove all indications of authorship.

The deadline for papers is February 28, 2010. Peer review and notification of acceptance will be completed by March 31, 2010. Final manuscripts accepted for publication will be due April 30, 2010.

Comments and queries can be sent to Bob Hanke, Guest Co-Editor, bhanke@yorku.ca.
For more information about the Canadian Journal of Media Studies, visit http://cjms.fims.uwo.ca/default.htm.

CFP on "free labor"

CALL FOR PAPERS:

"FREE...AS IN LABOR"

Popular Culture Association/

American Culture Association National Conference

April 8-11, 2009

New Orleans, LA, USA

The Communication and Digital Culture Area of the Popular Culture Association is soliciting proposals for panels and individual papers that explore online participatory culture and the problematic concept of "free labor" in a network society.

Corporations are increasingly counting upon the activity of a "participatory consumer" to provide the content for sites that directly or indirectly generate revenue. Twenty five years ago, GNU operating system activist Richard Stallman famously distinguished the "free" in free software as "free as in free speech, not as in free beer." What kind of "free" is the labor of a participatory culture? How does the appropriation of this work by major corporations complicate our understanding of "free labor"?

Possible topics include:

• Wikipedia and the Academy
• Gift Economies Online
• Free/Libre Open Source Software
• Intellectual Property
• Warez Subcultures
• "Immaterial" Labor
• Convergence & Consumer/Producers
• DIY Media
• Marx & the Digital Economy
• Fan Culture Appropriation

Submit a 250 word maximum proposal (hard copy or electronic) to:

Mark Nunes, Chair
Department of English, Technical Communication, and Media Arts
Southern Polytechnic State University
Marietta, GA 30060-2896
mnunes@spsu.edu

Deadline for Submissions: November 30, 2008

Note: Communication and Digital Culture is a themed area. Submissions off-theme should be submitted to:

• Internet Culture Area Chair, Montana Miller, montanm@bgnet.bgsu.edu
• Game Studies Area Co-Chairs, digitalgames.pcaaca@gmail.com

Thank you, wise crowd (plus some news)

First, let me acknowledge all of the good folks who've written in to provide feedback on my paper about Amazon's Kindle e-reading device and what I'm calling "the labor of reading." Your contributions (i.e., your labor!) certainly will help to sharpen my presentation, which I'll be delivering later this week at the American Studies convention in Albuquerque, NM. Thank you, wise crowd!

I'm also writing to share a bit of good news: the piece got a mention on the Los Angeles Times blog, Jacket Copy. You can read the complete article by clicking here. I'm just thrilled, needless to say. Who would have thought this little old conference paper would get national media attention?

Once the dust has settled from my trip, I'll be sure to post the final, definitive version of the Kindle paper to the D&R Wiki. Thanks again for now, and let me know what you think about the article on the Times blog.

Calling on the wisdom of crowds

I just finished what's admittedly a pretty drafty draft of the paper I'll be presenting at next week's American Studies Association (ASA) convention in Albuquerque, NM. The piece is called "Kindle: The New Book Mobile or, The Labor of Reading in an Age of Ubiquitous Bookselling." It's my first academic meditation on Amazon.com's Kindle e-reading device, which was released last year to much fanfare among technophiles...and equally as much dread among bibliophiles.

You may recall that I've blogged three times about Kindle here on D&R--last November, June, and August. Now I'm asking for your help. I've posted the working draft of my ASA/Kindle paper to the Differences & Repetitions Wiki, which you can find by clicking here. I feel as though the argument is proceeding more or less in the right direction, but at the same time your feedback would help me to tighten up the paper overall.

The Kindle page on D&R^W is set up to accept comments only rather actual changes to the text--this in contrast to my paper on Deleuze and communication from last year, which was (and remains!) a more open and collaborative authorial undertaking. In any case, I'd value any input you may have. Anonymous comments are welcome, too.

CFP: Media in Transition 6

Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission
International Conference April 24-26, 2009
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CALL FOR PAPERS

In his seminal essay "The Bias of Communication" Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media. Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while space-based media such as paper or papyrus can be understood as portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of transmission, diffusion, connections across space. Speculating on this distinction, Innis develops an account of civilization grounded in the ways in which media forms shape trade, religion, government, economic and social structures, and the arts.

Our current era of prolonged and profound transition is surely as media-driven as the historical cultures Innis describes. His division between the durable and the portable is perhaps problematic in the age of the computer, but similar tensions define our contemporary situation. Digital communications have increased exponentially the speed with which information circulates. Moore's Law continues to hold, and with it a doubling of memory capacity every two years; we are poised to reach transmission speeds of 100 terabits per second, or something akin to transmitting the entire printed contents of the Library of Congress in under five seconds.

Such developments are simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. They profoundly challenge efforts to maintain access to the vast printed and audio-visual inheritance of analog culture as well as efforts to understand and preserve the immense, enlarging universe of text, image and sound available in cyberspace.

What are the implications of these trends for historians who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture?

What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies?

How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?

What are the implications of this tension between storage and transmission for education, for individual and national identities, for notions of what is public and what is private?

We invite papers from scholars, journalists, media creators, teachers, writers and visual artists on these broad themes. Potential topics might include:

• The digital archive
• The future of libraries and museums
• The past and future of the book
• Mobile media
• Historical systems of communication
• Media in the developing world
• Social networks
• Mapping media flows
• Approaches to media history
• Education and the changing media environment
• New forms of storytelling and expression
• Location-based entertainment
• Hyperlocal media and civic engagement
• New modes of circulation and distribution
• The transformation of television -- from broadcast to download
• Backlashes against media change
• Virtual worlds and digital tourism
• The continuity principle: what endures or resists digital transformation?
• The fate of reading

Submissions

Abstracts of no more than 500 words or full papers should be sent to Brad Seawell at seawell@mit.edu no later than Friday, Jan. 9, 2009. We will evaluate abstracts and full papers on a rolling basis and early submission is highly encouraged. All submissions should be sent as attachments in a Word format. Submitted material will be subject to editing by conference organizers.

Email is preferred, but submissions can be mailed to:

Brad Seawell
MIT 14N-430
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139

Please include a biographical statement of no more than 100 words. If your paper is accepted, this statement will be used on the conference Web site.

Please monitor the conference Web site at http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6 for registration information, travel information and conference updates.

Abstracts will be accepted on a rolling basis until Jan. 9, 2009.

The full text of your paper must be submitted no later than Friday, April 17. Conference papers will be posted to the conference Web site and made available to all conferees.

CFP/SCMS: Online Publishing

This Call for Papers landed yesterday in my email in-box, and I figured some D&R readers might be interested. The proposed session will explore the future of scholarly communication--a very timely topic indeed. Enjoy, and please contribute if you're able to get yourself to Tokyo.

---

Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference
Tokyo, Japan
May 21-24, 2009

Call for Papers for a Proposed Workshop: Online Publishing

Publishing in the cinema and media studies community has grown considerably in the past few years. In addition to the traditional print format, online journals and blogs have become a viable resource for educators and students in our field. This workshop will examine the state of publishing in cinema and media studies by looking back at what has already been accomplished in print, and looking forward towards the promising (and potentially not so promising) directions that online publication might take. We will consider the differences between print and online forums of scholarly discourse, as well as evaluate the role that online publications fulfill for both the exploration of subjects and also for professional advancement. Topics for discussion will include (though need not be limited to): the production of online journals; the past, present, and future of print publication; the scholarly opportunities and limitations of blogs; and the legitimacy of print and online publications as resources for scholars and students alike.

Questions for consideration include:

• What are the challenges and opportunities of online publishing?
• Is there a future for print publication?
• What is the relationship between print and online publication?
• Are blog posts viable resources for academic research and writing?
• What role does professional accountability/peer review play in the self-publishing/blog paradigm?
• Are there networks or communities of academic cinema and media studies publications or bloggers?
• What role should interactive or dynamic content play in online academic discourse?
• Is there resistance to open-access models of online academic publishing?
• How does (or should) academic writing change across media platforms (print, online, blog)?

We would like to bring together professionals with direct experience producing print and/or online publications, academics who have extensive experience publishing in print and/or online publications, as well as graduate students currently working on the staff of online and/or print publications to discuss the past, present, and future of academic publication in cinema and media studies.

If you are interested in participating, please contact: John Bridge (jabridge@gmail.com) and Jen Porst (jenporst@mac.com).

Midwest Winter Workshop

Wow, what a weekend it's been! This Saturday, a great group of graduate students in my department hosted the third-annual Midwest Winter Workshop (a.k.a., MW3--you know something's significant when it warrants an acronym). The event brought together faculty and grads from some of the most stellar communication programs across the region. This year the participants hailed from the University of Illinois, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin. In years past, the event attracted folks from as far away as Pittsburgh and North Carolina.

The MW3 began with three back-to-back plenary addresses on Saturday morning, which focused on the theme of publics. The featured speakers were U of I's Cara Finnegan, who made the case for better historicization of "visual culture"; UMN's Ron Greene, who stressed the analytic importance of the category "communicative labor" in discussions of public activism; and IU's Phaedra Pezzullo, who explored the rhetorical processes through which deadly environmental hazards in and beyond the workplace have been rendered normal or everyday, and hence not worth publicizing. Needless to say, all three talks sparked lively discussion that lasted throughout the day.

Lunch was followed by the first round of break-out sessions, in which groups of 20 or so gathered to talk about specific themes. I had the good fortune of landing in the "Media and Counterculture" group, where I was joined by U of I's James Hay and Spencer Schaffner, U of W's Rob Howard, and by a talented group of grad students from across the six participant institutions. I talked about The Century of the Self, one of my favorite documentaries (and something I've posted about previously), as well as some books I've been reading that have provoked me to begin digging deeper into the intellectual-historical roots of oppositionalist discourses in cultural studies. (If you're interested, the books are Rachel Bowlby's Carried Away, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter's A Nation of Rebels, Preston Shires' Hippies of the Religious Right, Joseph Turow's Niche Envy, and Fred Turner's absolutely brilliant tome, From Counterculture to Cyberculture.) As a whole, the group tried to get at what it means to be "counter" and whether or not the term is politically serviceable in contemporary times.

Thereafter, even smaller groups convened to workshop graduate student writing and research. These break-outs, which were student-led, gave each participant the opportunity to receive feedback on his or her work from a cohort of grad students, in dialog with two faculty members. Personally, I enjoyed not only learning about Erik Johnson (NU), Michael Lahey (IU), Kim Singletary (NU), and Jeff. St. Onge's (IU) work, but also learning, through it, more about the kinds of questions their respective graduate programs are focusing on right now. We covered everything from Google Street View and the racial politics of high fashion to audience labor and emergent constraints on political activism in the United States. Whew!

Practically every faculty member I spoke to during the weekend commented on how much she or he enjoyed every aspect of the MW3. Especially welcome was the opportunity to interact with incredibly bright students from outside of one's home institution. I also heard several colleagues mention how much they appreciated the opportunity to get to know fellow faculty in a smaller, more personable setting than your usual large-scale academic conference. I couldn't agree more.

The MW3 was real gem, and that was due to all the students who made it happen. They're a remarkable bunch who deserve heaps of praise. And here I feel compelled to single out the IU Department of Communication and Culture's own Jeff Motter. He helped conceive of the first MW3 three years ago, when it was hosted at U of I, and both this year and last, he shouldered a major share of the responsibility in organizing the event here at IU. Kudos, Jeff, and thank you for such a memorable weekend.

Write, form a rhizome...

Differences and Repetitions began in many respects as a blog about the individual and collaborative writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It's always been about more than that, of course, but many of my earliest readers/interlocutors were fellow admirers of their work. I'm writing now to propose an experiment involving those of you with an interest in Deleuze and Guattari, and those of you who might be intrigued to participate for other reasons.

I've just completed a draft of a short paper on Deleuze and Guattari, which I'm scheduled to present at the US National Communication Association convention next week in Chicago, Illinois. It's part of a panel organized by my friend and colleague, Mehdi Semati, on the theme, "Against Communication: On the Deleuzoguattarian Ethics of Refusal (to Communicate)." Here's the deal: each of the panelists has chosen a short passage from the duo's work that says something about communication. My selection, which comes from What Is Philosophy? is this: “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present” (108; emphasis in original). Our task is to explicate and complicate our respective passages, in the strong sense in which Deleuze uses those terms. "To seek the truth is to interpret, decipher, explicate," he writes in Proust and Signs. "But this 'explication' is identified with the development of the sign itself" (2000: 17).

This is where you come in. I've set up a page on wikidot.com, which, like Wikipedia, allows users to view, comment on, and edit the document I've drafted. You can access the paper by clicking here. You don't need to do anything special to edit it; no registration or login is required. All you need to do is click the "edit" box near the bottom of the page, and the rest is more or less self-explanatory. If you'd rather not actively edit, you're always welcome to read the paper and email comments/ responses to me: striphas@indiana.edu. Alternatively, you can leave your comments here on D&R.

I'm interested in soliciting your input and collaboration for several reasons. For starters, I'd love some advance feedback on the piece before presenting it. But beyond that, having read Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture, and related materials, I find myself becoming increasingly interested in the creative possibilities of distributed peer production. Wikis and other such technologies seem to me commensurate, at least in principle, with Deleuze and Guattari's injunction from A Thousand Plateaus: "Write, form a rhizome..." (1987: 10). I thought it might be intriguing to try something like dissolving the speaking (or writing) subject in a piece ostensibly about "communication."

Anyone who contributes will, of course, get appropriately credited on the piece. I thank you in advance for your input and look forward to seeing how the essay shapes up.

Paris, c'est moi!

Well, I've been back from the University of East London's "Cultural Studies Now--An International Conference" for almost a couple of weeks. I'd intended to write sooner, but my head's just been dizzy trying to process the event--and getting caught up. Funny, isn't it, how you often need a break after returning from a trip?

Overall, the conference was a good show. Anything with a keynote by Stuart Hall is bound to be excellent, as far as I'm concerned. I also enjoyed the plenary sessions featuring Kuan-Hsing Chen, who talked about "Asia as Method," and Ien Ang, who offered a provocative reflection on where cultural studies might be headed. I regret having missed Rosi Braidotti, though I'd never been to London before and, well, London was calling. The panels I attended generally were quite good, and for my part I was pleased to present my work-in-progress on cultural studies and the politics of academic journal publishing. Gil "Revolution on Stick" Rodman and Melissa "Home Cooked Theory" Gregg have posted their thoughts on the conference, so you might want to check out their responses, too.

As you can see from the subject header, this post isn't really about London, or about "Cultural Studies Now." It's about the side-trip I made after the conference to Paris, France. It's an amazing city, and it's long been a dream of mine to go there. I wasn't disappointed. The art museums, the food, the architecture, the people, the language--it's just a remarkable place. I'll have to go back sometime soon...and maybe next time my near non-existent French will be a bit more existent.

Last year, when I traveled to Italy, I made a point of swinging by Rome's Protestant Cemetery, where the Marxist activist and political theorist Antonio Gramsci is interred. In the same spirit I tried tracking down the burial sites of some of my favorite French philosophers before heading to Paris. Unfortunately, I didn't get very far. Michel Foucault apparently is buried somewhere in northern France, Jacques Derrida in a Parisian suburb. Félix Guattari may be interred at La Borde Clinic, where he worked, and who knows where Gilles Deleuze is?

Anyway, I did discover that France, unlike the United States, cares a great deal about its intellectuals. As such, the country has a habit of naming public places after the most prominent among them. I visited two such spots. The first was the Place Sartre-Beauvoir, which is a good-sized square located off the Boulevard Saint-Germain. There I had coffee at Les Deux Magots, which, along with Cafe de Flore, was one of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's favorite hangouts back in the day. I also dropped by the College de France, where I had the pleasure of stumbling across the Square Michel Foucault. I'm sure there must have been other, similar sites that I missed. Even so, it was a treat just to find these two. Both seemed to embody how people and their ideas can matter.


P.S. This is post #100 on Differences & Repetitions. Thanks to all for your readership, comments, and encouragement.