reminder for everybody to submit a proposal.
The EASA Media Anthropology Network announces its Call for Papers
- 10th Biennial EASA Conference 2008: Experiencing
diversity and mutuality Ljubljana from 26 to 30. August 2008
Call for Papers (Deadline for online submission of proposals: 31 March 2008
Media, technology, and knowledge cultures: anthropological perspectives on
issues of diversity, mutuality and exclusion
In the recent years, many scholars in the field of media anthropology have
pointed out the necessity to study media as technology, in order to further
decenter the textual content of media in favor of their social context.
However, what do we mean by technology? This workshop intends to inspire the
reception of recent debates in anthropology and related neighboring
disciplines which have expanded the perspectives on technology vastly. Science
and technology studies, material culture studies, ecology and
environmentalism, medical anthropology, and anthropological studies of
cyberspace and technoscience, contribute to a much better understanding of
technologies not only as sets of material devices, but as complex, negotiated
arrangements of agents, social practices, cultural imaginations, and
circulating things. Abandoning older 'ballistic' concepts of technologies as
physical tools having an 'impact' on cultures, research into the dynamics of
technoscience suggests that
much of what constitutes technology in a given situation is the outcome of
politically interested media discourse producing models of diversity,
mutuality and exclusion. Nevertheless, every technological orthodoxy produces
its heterodoxy, as well. Unpacking the 'black box' of technologies,
therefore, means to look at different opposing ways of how technology is
culturally constituted by and in the media, how media-related practices
configure and re-configure technology, and how technology and cultural
imagination interplay.
Possible fields of exploration may include, among others: Symbolic
appropriations of technologies as 'techno-totems'; media, technology and the
body; technology and minority claims; technology and indigenous media; media
practices and technological ideologies; technologies, moral regimes, and joy;
technologies and the reconfiguration of nature-culture boundaries;
technologies and nationalism; technologies and imagined communities;
technology and creativity; entertainment; media technology and gambling;
technologies and representations of the post-human; visual cultures of
technology; technology, media and empowerment; technology and the construction
of the subject.
Convenors Cora Bender (University of Bremen) Corabender@aol.com;
cora.bender@yahoo.com
Ian Dent (University of Cambridge) Ian.Dent@iandent.com
Discussant: Dorle Dracklé
To submit a paper proposal, please visit the EASA homepage (www.easa2008.eu)
and find the workshop pages. Please click on Workshop No. 071 and use the link
provided to submit your proposal.
For any questions, please contact Cora Bender (Corabender@aol.com)
