Deadline for Submissions October 31, 2019

Call for Chapters: From Self-Portrait to Selfie: Contemporary Art and Self-Representation in the Social Media Age (10/31/2019)

Deadline for Submissions, October 31, 2019

Deadline for Submissions October 15, 2019

M/C Media/Culture Journal Call for Abstracts – ‘violence’ (15/10/2019)

‘violence’
We often think of violence in its most manifest forms: war, terrorism or massacres at schools. But violence also operates in more subtle forms. Some forms of violence are easily recognised, but others are decontextualised and depoliticised through complex cultural processes of normalisation and denial (Brison). Violence can become a spectacle, an aestheticised representation, or it can be reduced to banality when its horror and trauma is refracted through everyday lives and spaces which are shaped by violent systems and ideologies (Arendt). Notions of trauma, spectatorship, testimony, and witnessing circulate through narratives of violence. Ideas of “civilisation” implicitly and explicitly reference competing discourses of violence and put them to work in damaging ways, often in service of ideals (e.g. liberalism) that mask the very violence that support them. Even for those of us who feel generally safe, violence is all around us, shaping how we live, work, think, feel, and act. However, violence is not equally inflicted or experienced throughout the world. Ultimately, feeling safe is often a marker of privilege and this safety often comes at the price of violence enacted upon others.
This issue invites responses to the theme of “violence,” understood broadly, as it operates through various social, cultural, institutional, and affective domains.
Possible considerations include (but are by no means limited to):

• Symbolic violence and the discursive, political and social domination that shapes contemporary or historical realities.
• Pedagogical violence and the operation of power and control over the means of intellectual, social and cultural production in spaces of learning.
• Physical violence and the attendant damages that this entails.
• “Cartographies of violence” (Oikawa) and the production of subjectivities, histories and realities through spatial imaginaries (and regulation).
• The intersections of (racial, colonial, gendered, sexed, ableist) violence and the exclusions that this produces, depends on, and reifies.
• Political violence in the wake of polarisation.
• Technological violence and the ways in which media technologies facilitate or resist violence.
• Violence as a subject of public interest in forms including news media, true crime, and entertainment.

Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 100-250 words and a brief biography to the issue editors. Abstracts should include the article title and should describe your research question, approach, and argument. Biographies should be about three sentences (maximum 75 words) and should include your institutional affiliation and research interests. Articles should be 3000 words (plus bibliography). All articles will be double-blind refereed and must adhere to MLA style (6th edition).

Details

• Release date: 22 Apr. 2020
• Editors: Janine Gertz, Emma Maguire, Theresa Petray, and Bryan Smith
• Send us your 150 word abstract proposals as soon as possible, and preferably by 15 October 2019. Full essay deadline to be negotiated with editors but likely by 1 December.

Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to violence@journal.media-culture.org.au.
For Author Guidelines see here: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

Janine Gertz, Emma Maguire, Theresa Petray & Bryan Smith
James Cook University

Deadline for Submissions October 15, 2019

Deadline for Submissions October 15, 2019

Call for Papers
Conference
Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics
February 6 and 7, 2020 at the University of Vienna

Collaboration of Character Assassination and Reputation Politics (CARP) Research Laboratory, George Mason University, Viriginia, and Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna

In the earliest documents of the genre transmitted from antiquity, biography and its reception are already associated with the creation of positive or negative personal reputations of politicians, artists,
scientists or military leaders. Autobiography, in turn, whetherspiritual since late antiquity or generally secular since the Enlightenment, has also been used to publicly create and negotiate reputations of its narrators and protagonists. The relation of such
reputations created in biography and autobiography to the author figures and historical persons has produced long-standing scholarly and popular
debates in terms of fictionality or nonfictionality, semiotic constructedness, and reliability. In the past decades, however, life writings – including biography and autobiography as much as diaries or letters and, more contemporarily, life narratives and egodocuments in media such as painting, cinema, graphic novels, digital formats andphotography, for example – have been critically discussed in terms of
cultural and national significations, affective patterns,
psychologically and legally coded constructions – relating to trauma studies, witnessing and testimonials – or narratological conventions including perspectives, temporalities or individual and collective memory. The discussion of life narratives and their genre conventions, patterns and protocols as established means of creating and destroying
reputations appears to have met with only minor interest in the field.

At this juncture, Auto/Biography Studies and Reputation Politics Studies might benefit mutually and strongly from an interdisciplinary collaboration. For a range of studies of reputation politics and
reputation management in psychology, communication studies, political sciences and historical science, contemporary methodologies and theories of life writing and life narrative in literary, cultural and media studies provide refined terminologies and tested approaches in respect
of the determining effects of generic and narrative conventions, semiotic materiality and medial intransparency, as well as questions of agency, relationality and network structures; and, reversely, for the study of auto/biography, the recently developed categories and critical methods in the study of reputation politics provide new ways for ethical consideration of life narratives by addressing the creation or destruction of life stories in public.

Through reputation politics studies, as an emerging field that is revitalizing interests of rhetorical studies and political sciences since antiquity, human-rights approaches or memory studies in life writing research, for example, may be further detailed by address to the evaluative strategies behind the creation of specific structures of personalities and narrated characters and lives and, for example, the
seemingly returning attraction in these days of isolating identity images and discourses long considered defunct. The critical discussion of the textually produced relations between the individual and the communal or collective in the age of populist revival and resurging nationalism benefits from the joint address to life narratives and reputation politics. Conceivable for discussion, among others, are the
following questions:

• Has the term reputation lost relevance in the contemporary age of intense and deep mediatization and rapid globalization of life stories and their ever-changing, elusive evaluative reception?
• If processuality and relationality of agencies in production and reception of works of culture as well as the intransparency of the medium have become of guiding interest in contemporary auto/biography
studies, how might the medial production of a reputation be systematically considered in processual terms?
• What is the benefit of the continuing address to the ancient category of character in discussions of ‘character assassination’? Who or what is a character in relation to personality, self, individual, protagonist, narrator, author?
• Has the term reputation become part of an elitist discourse that collides with precepts of the race-class-gender and further categories of cultural-studies critiques? If there is an intersectionality of
reputation, is there a transversality, as well?
• When politicians write autobiographies, how do the self-images created in these autobiographies relate to historiography and biography?
• How are fiction and non-fiction in auto/biography and autofiction as well as their discussion related to reputation constructions and their criticism?
• What are the relations of private and public practices of life writing with reputation building?
• How is the discussion of the mediality of works of auto/biography freshly challenged by consideration of the multimodality of the medial channels and materialities through which reputations are generated and put to political use?
• How does historiography as a genre that is still often determined by descriptions of individual lives and personalities rather than relational perspectives, and as such still committed to its derivation from protocols of biography in antiquity, benefit from the critical combination of methods and theories of Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics Studies?

For a principal orientation regarding the two fields, respectively, and as a common ground for initiation of methodological discussion, we suggest Routledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Management, ed. Sergei Samoilenko, Martijn Icks, Jennifer Keohane and Eric Shiraev (Routledge, in print, fall 2019), or Samoilenko, Shiraev, Keohane and Icks, “Character Assassination (general)” in The Global Encyclopedia of Informality, ed. Alena Ledeneva (UCL Press 2018)
441–445, and Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction, ed. Martina
Wagner-Egelhaaf (De Gruyter 2019). Please also see the websites of IABA, the International Auto/Biography Association, and of CARP Research Lab,
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home and
https://carplab.wordpress.com.

We welcome interdisciplinary and methodologically explicit papers that address critical questions across an international variety of works, genres, media and practices, with attention to theoretical premises of
both Auto/Biography Studies and Reputation Politics Studies. Conference language will be English. Several publishers, including Macmillan, Sage,
Routledge, and Taylor & Francis, have expressed interest in the publication of a volume comprising the results of the conference. Please send proposals (600 words maximum exclusive of references) plus a short academic biography to nadja.gernalzick@univie.ac.at and eshiraev@gmu.edu
by October 15, 2019. Notice of acceptance will be given by October 30, 2019.

The conference is co-organized by Nadja Gernalzick, Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna, and Eric Shiraev, George Mason University, Arlington, Virginia, U.S.A, with the assistance of Edwina Hagen, University of Amsterdam; Martijn Icks, University of Amsterdam;
Jennifer Keohane, University of Baltimore, and Sergei Samoilenko, George Mason University.
_____________________
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Nadja Gernalzick
Visiting Professor
Department of English and American Studies
Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies
University of Vienna
Campus, Hof 8.3
Spitalgasse 2-4
1090 Wien
Austria

Campus, Hof 8.3, Room 3E-02-08A
nadja.gernalzick@univie.ac.at

*

Deadline for Submissions October 15, 2019

Deadline for Submissions October 15, 2019

Call for Contributions

Semiotics in Cultural Studies/Semiotiken in den Kulturwissenschaften

The collection Semiotiken in den Kulturwissenschaften/Semiotics in Cultural Studies opens a comparative and transdisciplinary discussion on the uses and critical methodology of semiotics in cultural studies.

Histories of cultural studies (Assmann 2017 [2006]; Bachmann-Medick 2016 [2006]; During 2005; During ed. 2001 [1993];  Fauser 2011 [2003]; Marchart 2018 [2008]; Musner ed. 2001; Nünning and Nünning eds. 2008 [2003]; Takahashi 2004; Kittler 2000; and many others) have usually not addressed the provenances of the semiotics employed in diverse cultural-studies approaches or have done so peripherally only. While poststructuralist influences are frequent and noted in cultural studies and imply a recourse to the history of structuralist semiotics of some kind, for example, the semiotic theories and models informing various schools and traditions of cultural studies are hardly critically discussed in terms of the role semiotics take in informing and shaping cultural studies methodologies. When cultural studies are understood as media studies, as they must be from a contemporary semiotic perspective, the need for coherent explications of semiotic assumptions and methodologies in diverse scholarly approaches to cultural products becomes even more felt. While histories and systematics of semiotics  address areas of cultural-studies interest (Posner/Robering/Sebeok 1997–2004), a comprehensive cultural-studies review of semiotics has not
yet been developed. This collection is meant to offer a first stepping stone towards a systematic and critically methodological comparison of the diversity of applications of semiotics in cultural studies by providing, as incentives for a wider discussion, treatments of individual traditions and problematics of semiotics in cultural studies.

Including the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, there have been and are a variety of explicitly semiotic approaches in cultural studies since the late nineteenth century, for example from Ferdinand de Saussure and structuralism to semiotics of culture by Roland Barthes, or from poststructuralism to representationalism (Birmingham School) and the plurality of methods in so-called cultural semiotics (www.kultursemiotik.com). The investigation of visual signs after early iconology (Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky) or the diagrams and orders of signs developed for the notation of phenomena in myth studies and early anthropology (George Frazer) also employ diverse semiotic conceptions and methods that have been extended to and are referenced in these days.
How do tenets of Saussurian semiology inform structural anthropology?
When such methods are critically and comparatively studied, the position of discourse analysis after Michel Foucault on the spectrum also has to be investigated: what is historical semantics (Dietrich Busse) in relation to discourse analysis and cultural semiotics? How is the agency of actors, for example after actor network theory (Bruno Latour), integrated in models of signification and what is the semiotics of actor network theory? The models of signification and of actants are as diverse as are the semiotics and semiologies, even if individual areas
of application of semiotics prefer specific models like the notorious use of the differentiation of icon, index and symbol after Peirce in theories of documentary film and photography.

Contemporarily and continuingly, materiality and deixis appear to be important concepts in theories of signs, and the relation of semiotics and media studies is of particular interest in times of a phenomenologization of media studies as in approaches to a “semiotic phenomenology” (Malin Wahlberg) in film studies as well as in new materialism or posthumanism. Elaborations of deconstruction and grammatology, for example in image studies (Sigrid Weigel), call for conceptualizations of principal relationality and differantiality beyond identificatory reductions of signs to referents. Where is the connection of a materialist semiotics in diagrammatics (Matthias Bauer und Christoph Ernst), intermateriality (Andrea Seier) and the materialism of
posthumanism (Cary Wolfe)?

We welcome comparative methodological, theoretical and historical discussions of semiotics, investigations of specific problems in semiotics of cultural studies as well as sample applications of methodologically reflected semiotic approaches in cultural studies.

Possible contributions may address or include, among others, the fields of

semiotics and cultural studies, approaches and examples since the 1880s:
anthropology from James Frazer to Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude Lévi-Strauss; iconology and its extension to image studies, visual culture studies and semiotics of the image; semiotics after Charles Sanders Peirce: pragmatism; semiology after Ferdinand de Saussure: structuralism; …

semiotics and cultural studies, approaches and examples since the 1950s: discourse analysis and dispositives after Michel Foucault, historical epistemology, cultures of knowledge; semiotics of culture after RolandBarthes; grammatology after Jacques Derrida; …

schools and methods of cultural studies and their semiotics:
Frankfurt school (is there a semiotics of the Frankfurt School?);
Birmingham school; postcolonialism; pragmatism; mixed methods and grounded theory; cultural concepts of the body; cultural memory, memory studies; trauma studies; Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis; actor network theory; posthumanism; relationalism; Linienwissen, Liniendenken;
diagrammatics; new materialism; posthermeneutics; …

transdisciplinary semiotics in cultural studies:
history and theory of art and architecture; media theory, media
philosophy, media ecology; design theory; aesthetics of reception; neurobiology and cognitive science; neuronal networks and artificial intelligence; theater studies, theories of ritual and performance studies; film studies; queer theory; comparative literature; narratology, narrative environments; translation studies; archaeology; historiography; auto/biography and automediality studies; social
semiotics; approaches to multimodality; communication studies; numerology; sound studies; media archaeologies; theory of technics and technology; …

The collection is intended as a bilingual volume, and we accept original contributions in English or German. The collection is scheduled to appear with transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, Germany, in a new series on cultural studies under the general editorship of Kulturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft (KWG).

Please send proposals (about 400 words) in English or German plus a short academic biography to the volume editors by October 15, 2019: nadja.gernalzick@univie.ac.at and thomasmetten@me.com.

Prof. Dr. Nadja Gernalzick
Department of English and American Studies
Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies
University of Vienna
Austria

Dr. Thomas Metten
Transfer Center
University of Passau
Germany

with the assistance of

Nora Benterbusch M.A.
Art History and Cultural Studies
European Comparative Media Studies
Saarland University
Germany

Dipl.-Biol. Filip Niemann
Psychiatry and Psychotherapy III
Section Neuropsychology and Functional Imaging
University Hospital Ulm
Germany

New Series (Bordeaux University Press): Contemporary Autobiographical Practices

This new collection publishes original manuscripts (monographs and collective volumes in French or English) that examine :

• Self-referential narratives, and the way they are published and read (and the increasing role of new technology, more particularly phenomena like blogs or social networks, but also the resurgence of more ancient forms such as diaries)
• The ontological and psychological dispositions that lead us to tell about ourselves and our lives to others—and the communicational structures entailed­—and their possible pathological or curative dimension.
• Outstanding contemporary autobiographical ventures (mostly from the anglophone world—Henry Roth, Edward St. Aubyn, Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson…—but they can be compared to similar works from other linguistic areas such as Elena Ferrante or Karl Ove Knausgaard) and what they reveal about current publishing policies, formal and aesthetic evolutions and reader responses.
• Self-representation for commercial purposes (from an author’s picture on a dust cover to authors’ personal websites) or political ones.
• Self-representation in visual arts (painting, photography, cinema and graphic memoirs).
• And more generally theoretical approaches to the issue of the fact/fiction border and the line separating self-portrait and self-reinvention.

Our aim is to publish texts by authors who have a good knowledge of contemporary stakes and concepts linked to self-narration, and whose approach is not limited to literature but branches out into other fields (sociology, cognitive sciences, psychoanalysis…) in order to better understand a will, a need—to narrate oneself, to narrate one’s self—intrinsic to human beings.

Edited by Arnaud Schmitt (arnaud.schmitt@u-bordeaux.fr) and Stéphanie Ravez (stephanie.ravez@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr)