[FoME] CFP: “What’s New about New Media? The Technology of Protest Past and Present”

[Merlyna Lim]

http://hate2point0.com/new-media-cfp/

Symposium
“What’s New about New Media? The Technology of Protest Past and Present”

Department of History
Carleton University, Ottawa Canada
April 23, 24, 2015

>From the G8 demonstrations to the Occupy Movements, Idle No More, and
revolutions in the Middle East, the last few years have witnessed a
phenomenal upswing in the use of social media in popular protest.
Social technology has played an important role in mobilizing
grassroots opposition and, according to some scholars and pundits, it
has served to politicize a broader base, bringing about greater
participation in and new forms of civic action. Activists use
platforms like Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to raise
consciousness around lightning-rod issues. New technologies aid in the
organization of demonstrations. They help mobilize emotions, map out
logistics, and after all is said and done, they catalogue and document
opposition success and further challenges. Social media’s
democratizing potential is not without its detractors, however, and
alongside concerns for the protection of privacy and surveillance,
skeptics question whether networked publics really can serve as
meaningful spaces of protest and opposition.

In lending shape to everyday opposition, cataloguing images of excess
and exuberance, and circulating them in networked publics, there can
be no doubt Web 2.0 is writing a history of the present. Yet aside
from the thorny issue of impact, it is worth asking how new is new
media in the way it shapes protest and opposition? This two-day
symposium aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of
scholars to interrogate what is in fact new, different, and unique
about how “old” and “new” media have structured, popularized, given
voice to, and helped mobilize protest and opposition across time and
space.

We will discuss pre-circulated papers of 15 pages in length. Each
paper should demonstrate a conceptual engagement with the interplay of
time and place-specific media and their relation to public sentiment
and opposition. Dr. Merlyna Lim, Carleton University’s Canada Research
Chair in in Digital Media and Global Network Society will provide a
keynote.

Themes may include:

-vernacular forms of protest across time and media
-protest and public engagement, diverse publics, counterpublics
-protest and affect
-protest as performance, the staging of opposition, counter protest
and solidarity
-visualizing, spatializing, or mapping violence, resistance, and identity
-media, self, and subjectivity – forging activist or oppositional selves
-networks of opposition and collusion
-rethinking the local, the regional, and the global
-mediatized protest: chronicle, archive, database, scrapbook
-media, protest, and public/social memory

Please forward a short CV and a 1-2 page paper abstract to the
following address by December 15th, 2014,
newmediaconference at carleton.ca

Dr. Jennifer Evans
Associate Professor and Graduate Chair
Department of History
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa, ON
K1S 4P6

Email: newmediaconference at carleton.ca

* There will be some contribution to the cost of accommodation but
travel costs must be borne by the symposium attendee

http://hate2point0.com/new-media-cfp/