(I) Neomedievalism and the Corporate; (II)Realms of Play, Regimes of Truth; (III) Medieval Video Game Festival Poster Session

Please consider submission of proposals for any of three sessions at the 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/) at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan from May 10-13, 2012.

These sessions are all sponsored by Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization (http://medievalelectronicmultimedia.org/); one of these sessions is being co-sponsored with Studies in Medievalism (http://www.medievalism.net/) and Medievally Speaking (http://studiesinmedievalism.blogspot.com/).

I.ROUNDTABLE: Neomedievalism and the Corporate (co-sponsored with Studies in Medievalism and Medievally Speaking)
How have corporate structures contributed to the development of neomedievalism?  How has neomedievalism affected the development of corporate structures?  What is medieval in corporate structures?  What is corporate in the medieval?  For the past several years, MEMO has been working with Studies in Medievalism to generate several volumes of work that explore neomedievalism; in fact, “Neomedievalism and the Corporate” is a title borrowed from the editor of Studies in Medievalism, Karl Fugelso.  One recent out-growth of these publications, that also appeared in MEMO’s 2011 paper session, was a beginning exploration of the influence(s) of corporate sponsorship upon medievalist products (particularly video games).

II.PAPER SESSION: Realms of Play, Regimes of Truth
Explorations of medieval electronic media in terms of neomedievalism, free will epistemology, ethics and agency, becoming the Other, questing theory, human rights, freedom of expression, and/or freedom of choice.  This session is inspired by some of the ideas and arguments presented at the 2011 Congress in MEMO’s sessions, in volumes of Studies in Medievalism, and in MEMO’s forthcoming anthology of essays.  At the 2011 Congress MEMO paper session and round table discussion session (which were back-to-back), a deeper discussion of how power (corporate, discursive, pedagogical,…) influences and/or is controlled by play and “truth” in (neo)medievalist electronic media.  In what ways is that power contemporary in structure?  In what ways is it medieval?  Why do we look to the Middle Ages for inspiration?  Is this a form of power-play with contemporary chaos?  This includes analysis of portrayals of reality under the power of discourse, be it “authentic” or not.

III.WORKSHOP & POSTER SESSION: Festive Electronic Games
Each year, we work to improve upon our annual video game workshop.  This year, in addition to providing video game demonstrations, complemented by posters (either on laptops or on poster-board), we would like to divide the room between game developers and game users.  Submit proposals for posters and demonstrations of games under analysis and/or  construction: MMORPGs, 2nd Life, Open Source/Free Software Games, priority software games, text-based games, gaming communities and their forums and blogs,…

Please submit proposals of up to 300 words along with the Participant Information Form (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#Paper) by September 20, 2011. Participants will be contacted regardless of whether or not their proposal has been accepted, and all proposals submitted but not accepted will be sent on to the general committee for consideration in one of the general sessions at Kalamazoo.

Please submit proposals and Participant Information Forms via email or fax:
Carol L. Robinson
EMAIL: clrobins@kent.edu
FAX: 330-437-0490

 

Faulkner in the Media Ecology 

Building on a string of recent work on both Faulkner scholarship and Modernism studies, this signature international conference is set to explore the sometimes open, sometimes hidden, relationship between the verbal art of perhaps America’s greatest novelist, and the mechanical and electronic media that increasingly defined the communications of his time.

The Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia and the School of English, Media and Performing Arts is proud to host the “Faulkner in the Media Ecology” conference, where established and emergent scholars from three continents will explore this urgent theme over three days in late November.

Registration is now open: http://faulkner2011.arts.unsw.edu.au/about.html

http://faulkner2011.arts.unsw.edu.au/index.html

 

Future Theory, Present Praxis: Humanities as Digital Discipline

In the summer of 2010 the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada put out a call for knowledge synthesis projects on the digital economy. This funding opportunity not only identified the digital economy as a major player in Canada’s economic and cultural future, but also demanded that researchers in the humanities and social sciences step forward to play a role in articulating the parameters and concerns of that future. As an institutional acknowledgement of the increasingly fundamental interrelations between the humanities and the digital sphere, SSHRC’s initiation of the knowledge synthesis projects is a key but not unique instance of the increasing institutionalization of the digital humanities in Canada. Annual events like the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria and degree-granting programs such as the Humanities Computing program at the University of Alberta point the way toward an increasingly digitized future for the humanities.

Against this climate of institutionalized inevitability, however, is contrasted the many difficulties and points of resistance that characterize the response of students and scholars of the humanities to their digitization of our disciplines. The digital humanities presents both an opportunity and a potential quagmire of pedagogical, methodological, and political concerns. What does the “death of the book” mean to a new generation of students? How have our objects of study changed, and can our research keep up with them? Does a turn to the digital risk a simultaneous turn away from the political?

This interdisciplinary conference seeks papers that respond to or explore the digital turn in the humanities from the perspective of emerging scholars. How does your own work engage with or resist the digital turn? What institutional opportunities or obstacles have you encountered as an emerging scholar? Has the digital turn changed what it means to be a humanities scholar?

Other topics might include:

– Pedagogy and digital resources in the classroom.
– The politics and funding of virtual departments.
– Issues of accessibility and exclusion with new
technologies.
– Indisciplinarity in the virtual office.
– The future of the librarian and library.
– Materiality and textuality.
– High versus Low culture.
– Video games, blogs, and other “new” objects of study.

We welcome topics from all areas of the humanities reflecting on any aspect of the digital humanities. Please send 350 word abstracts accompanied by a brief (100-150 word) biographical note to future@uoguelph.ca by August 31.

 

Pragmatics of African English in Digital Discourse

Editors: Innocent Chiluwa, Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria; Presley Ifukor, University of Osnabrueck, Germany & Rotimi Taiwo, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, Nigeria

The proposed publication aims at harnessing research results in the pragmatics of the varieties of English in Africa in the context of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). We encourage papers representing current state of the art research in linguistics/discourse pragmatics seen in the broad sense as a functional (i.e. social and cultural) perspective on digital discourse.

We invite scholars doing research in any of the varieties of new world Englishes particularly of African origin (e.g. Nigerian English, Cameroonian English, Kenyan English, South African English, Sierra Leonean English, Kenyan English, Tanzanian English etc) and CMC to submit proposals in the following subject areas:

• Electronic Mailing (Email)
• Instant Messaging (IM)
• Internet Relay Chats (IRC)
• Text messaging (SMS)
• Blogging
• Discussion forum
• Virtual community
• Youtube
• Twitter
• Facebook, etc.
Papers should highlight features of African English and show how these manifest in any of the above forms of CMC applying the following pragmatic principles/approaches:
• speech act theory
• Gricean, neo-Gricean and post-Gricean analysis of linguistic performance
• relevance theory
• (im)politeness
• pragmatic presupposition
• deixis
• intercultural pragmatics etc.
Submission Procedure:

Interested scholars and researchers are encouraged to submit a one-page chapter proposal on or before November 30, 2011, clearly stating the purpose of the chapter, its contents and how the proposed chapter meets the overall objectives of the proposed publication. A proposal should include the following information:

(a) Title of chapter
(b) Name of author(s),
(c) Affiliation
(d) Email

Submissions should be in Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by December 31, 2011. Upon acceptance of their proposals, authors will have until March 31st, 2012 to prepare their chapters of 5,000-7,000 words. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. Guidelines for preparing chapters will be sent upon acceptance of proposals. The book is tentatively scheduled to be published in third quarter of 2012 by one of Europe’s top language series publishers.

Please e-mail all inquiries and proposal submissions to: robineber@gmail.com

Full contact: Dr Innocent Chiluwa
Department of Languages,
Covenant University, Ota
Nigeria
+234 803 353 6952

 

States of Emergence, States of Emergency: Deadline Extended to 1st November

Excursions Journal
Call For Papers
‘States of Emergence, States of Emergency’
Deadline for articles: 1st November 2011
Submit online at: http://www.excursions-journal.org.uk/cfp.html

‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history which is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism.’
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940)

Benjamin’s remarks on states of emergency have been fundamental to an understanding of political life which considers the roles played by threat, danger and fear in processes of political control. In one sense, Benjamin suggests that we live in a constant state of emergency, something Giorgio Agamben has called the ‘paradigm of modern politics’, a situation where threat is deployed by government in order to wield power and restrict human rights. Yet Benjamin refers to the need to ‘bring about a real state of emergency’ (italics added), suggesting, perhaps, the etymological connection (missing in the original German, but potent in English) between ‘emergency’ and the verb ‘emerge’. We could thus evoke a connection between Benjamin’s articulation and a call for something new, for a state of emergence in which newness is constituted.

Excursions, an interdisciplinary, open-access, peer-reviewed journal, now calls for submissions upon the theme of emergence/emergency which draw upon the vast possibilities contained both in terms of disaster, threat and power, as well as beginning, becoming and creating. As a journal with an interdisciplinary mandate we welcome research from all areas, creating a space wherein the richness of concepts can be explored. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

● The history of states of emergency, states of emergency in different historical contexts, parallels across contexts
● A literal take on ‘states of emergence/ emergency’ perhaps inspired by the ‘Arab Spring’ – the emergence of new democracies, new political rights, new modes of political representation
● New technologies/media – their role in shaping public space, discourse and our
relationships with others; their implication in new forms of representation/artistic practice; the (re)presentation of states of emergency in the media
● General emergence – the rise of new aesthetic or political paradigms and perhaps the difficulties inherent in recognising/ narrating these emergences
● Emergence and origins – narratives or myths of origins and emergence; our modes of narrating the emergence of the individual, the state etc.
● Scientific advances – space exploration, genetics, cloning – the border of threat and
newness
● Environmental/ecological disaster and emergent environmental conditions
● Physical/chemical states, stasis and change

 

Remixing the American Renaissance (C19), Sept. 23 / April 12

Panel: Remixing the American Renaissance
Conference: C19, “Prospects: A New Century,” Berkeley, CA, 12-15 April 2012
Deadline: Friday, Sept. 23, 2011

I am seeking participants for a panel at the April, 2012, C19 Conference, to be held at U.C. Berkeley, which will examine remixes of, and applications of remix / adaptation theory by, works written during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Produced at the dawn of the first information revolution in the United States – not just print, but cheap, abundant print, as well as the rise of visual and mass culture – the works of the American Renaissance made conscious use of the strategies which would come to be defined as remix culture (sampling, reappropriation, mixing of genres, repackaging) to tell stories which were central to the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The use of these strategies, then, makes these works themselves uniquely susceptible to the remixture in contemporary society. The natural state key works of the American Renaissance is not one of stasis, but of remixture: adaptation, fluid textuality, reprinting, reapporpraition, distortion.

This view of textual fluidity in the middle decades of the nineteenth century draws on the work of: John Bryant, The Fluid Text (2002); Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality (2004); Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (2006); Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2007). The contemporary remix or adaptation, (be it textual, cinematic, televisual, audial, or a variety of these working together under the rubric of new media), then, is not so much an attempt to embody some re-represent some stable textual core, but is the latest in a series of fluid texts and remixes initiated by the initial publication of the works of the American Renaissance.

Especially welcome would be papers that looks at new media applications of remix culture to the works mid-nineteenth-century American literature. But any and all provoking considerations of remixes of and by works written by American authors during the nineteenth century would be welcome.

Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words by Friday, September 23rd to:

Les Harrison
Associate Professor of American Literature
Virginia Commonwealth University
804.827.8334

Come Together: Digital Collaboration in the Academy and Beyond – May 11-13 2012

Come Together: Digital Collaboration in the Academy and Beyond seeks to explore the relationship between digital technology and academic, activist and artistic collaborations. Our focus is on how these collaborations come into being, what challenges they present, and how they are reshaping both the academy and the world at large. While we welcome all papers on the topic of digital collaboration, we are especially interested in those that examine the ways in which technology enables work across disciplinary, geographic, cultural and/or other boundaries, those that identify and/or propose solutions to the barriers that still need to be overcome, and those that offer frameworks for innovative forms of digital collaboration.

In addition to traditional 20-minute papers, we also welcome proposals for round tables, workshops and non-traditional modes of information sharing such as online presentations and discussion. We are pleased to receive proposals from all interested individuals, regardless of affiliation.

Potential topics include:

• Digital collaboration between activists, writers, academics, artists, journalists etc.
• The impact of digital media on pedagogy and learning at universities and beyond
• The consequences of listservs, blogs, message boards and other forms of digital communication
• Modes of thought or artistic expression that become (im)possible through digital collaboration
• Copyright law and its effect on online collaboration, and vice versa
• The Internet as a tool for coordinating or suppressing social, political and cultural activity
• The “digital divide,” its consequences, and/or how it can be overcome
• The economy of digital collaboration, or Wikinomics

Individuals interested in presenting 20-minute papers should submit abstracts of up to 300 words, and individuals or groups interested in proposing a roundtable, workshop or non-traditional session should submit a 500 word proposal outlining the format and intended aims of the session. All proposals should be emailed to cometogether2012@gmail.com by September 25, 2011. The conference will be hosted at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario on May 11-13th, 2012.

For further information, please check our website at cometogether2012.wordpress.com, or follow us on twitter @cometogether12.

 

Modern Language Studies, Books Reviews

Modern Language Studies, the journal of the Northeast Modern Language Association, is seeking reviews of primary sources (including scholarly editions, contemporary literature, art, film, comic books, visual and popular culture), pedagogical works, and hypertext publications.

I am particularly interested in receiving reviews of hypertext publications. Hypertext presents limitless possibilities, but many web projects would doubtless benefit from a more stringent review process.

Graduate students are welcome to contribute to the journal. Please submit your review electronically (as a Word attachment) to Randy Robertson, Reviews Editor of MLS, at robertson@susqu.edu.

 

New Media and the Digital Humanities

Communications media have been integral to American life from the early colonization of New England to the transnational networks formed during the twentieth century. This special issue will explore the insights that emerge when we think about mediation in general and digital technologies more specifically in the context of American literary history and cultural production. Over the last decade, the work of scholars such as Alexander Galloway and Lisa Nakamura has already reframed key questions about class, gender, and race in visual and digital contexts. This issue seeks to explore further how new media change the way that we think about American literature and the methods we use to study it.

This issue encourages a broad range of questions about the relationship between new media and American literature. How, for instance, might we think about literary representations of media that are perceived as new in their historical period? How do digital media transform the formal and political dimensions of contemporary American literature? How have prose styles and aesthetics, at different historical moments, been influenced by new communications technologies from the telegraph to the phonograph to cinema to the digital computer to mobile phones? Moreover, do the transmedia dimensions of such technologies suggest a scope that surpasses the geopolitical boundaries of the United States? Finally, how do American studies methods help us think about paraliterary productions such as electronic narratives and digital games? How does American literature help us understand the relationship between cultural theory (for example, critical race scholarship) and media studies (such as software studies)? How are digital humanities methods, both qualitative and quantitative, affecting American studies for better or worse? Are the humanities now necessarily digital?

For this issue, there is also the possibility of an accompanying Web site that would publish peer-reviewed multimodal pieces that use new media in their very form. If you are interested in submitting a more experimental piece, please contact the editors before submitting. Some production support may be available for these works, especially for work undertaken in the new authoring platform Scalar. Scalar is designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form scholarship online. The platform particularly facilitates work that engages visual materials. For more information about Scalar, please see scalar.usc.edu/anvc.

Special issue editors will be Wendy H. K. Chun, Patrick Jagoda, and Tara McPherson. Submissions of 11,000 words or less (including endnotes) should be submitted electronically at www.editorialmanager.com/al/ by 31 March 2012. When choosing a submission type, select “New Submission-New Media Special Issue.” For assistance with the submission process, please contact the office of American Literature at (919) 684–3948 or am-lit@duke.edu. Please direct other questions to Wendy H. K. Chun (Wendy_Hui_Kyong_Chun@Brown.edu), Patrick Jagoda (pjagoda@uchicago.edu), or Tara McPherson (tmcphers@usc.edu).