[Air-L] CFP Digital Intimacies Conference (14-15th, December)

[Andrea Alarcon]

Abstracts due August 25th



The Digital Intimacies 9 call for papers is now live! The theme for 2023 is
"Life Among the Ruins":



* "Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place.
The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to
know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily
there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the
overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes…" (Tsing, 2015, pp. 282).*


Digital intimate publics express that the “vibe is off”, a sense that
things aren’t quite right as we doom scroll on and on and on. A state of
precarity and instability has left ruin and decay in its wake. From failed
political systems, burnt-out utopias and bombed out landscapes, to the
eerie and empty urban spaces of the mass industrial era, the persistent
rubble left from (neo)colonisation and cultures threatened by climate
crises, to recently obsolescent technologies, hyperlinks rotting away, and
glitchy automated systems.



Despite the rubble seeming dead and inert, Anna Tsing (2015) reminds us
that ruins are lively places where new multi-species and multi-cultures
thrive. From a flattened out, ruined landscape, new possibilities grow.
Ruins can be enclaves of hope as much as mourning, loss, and longing: they
not only invoke nostalgic reflections, but open up space to dream and
imagine the future.



Digital intimate publics share the affective experience of life amid the
ruin. They are formed in circumstances of something being ‘off’, of being
squeezed, constituted from positions of non-dominance. Digital intimacies
come to be not in the gleaming corporate towers and cathedrals, but in the
messy in-between spaces where resilient, creative practices of ‘making do’
emerge.



For Digital Intimacies 9 we ask in what ways are digital intimacies
reckoning with the ruined structures they find themselves in? We invite
submissions across disciplines to critically engage with, interpret,
locate, theorise, or dissect the notion of life amid the ruins in abstract
and creative ways. Additionally we encourage applicants to think broadly
about the intersections between digital intimate publics and ruins to look
with a hopeful eye for what may grow on the edges of our worlds.



We welcome papers and presentations in various formats exploring topics
including but not restricted to:


·       Everyday responses to ruin


·       Tactics and strategies of ‘making do’.

·       Obsolescent technologies and outdated digital media.

·       The politics of nostalgia and the future.

·       Stories, voices and practices from the margins.

·       Resistance, opposition and subversion in digital spaces.

·       Community, kinship and care during and after crises.

·       As well as papers covering broader questions and topics relating to
digital intimacies.




This year Digital Intimacies 9 is being organised as a joint collaboration
between Digital Cultures and Societies at the University of Queensland and
the Digital Media Research Centre at QUT.


*To submit please email digitalcultures at hass.uq.edu.au
<digitalcultures at hass.uq.edu.au> with a 200-300 word abstract and a 1-2
sentence bio by August 25th.*



The symposium will be a hybrid event held from the 14th to the 15th of
December at QUT Gardens Point campus, Brisbane, Australia (lift access
available) and online.



For more information check out our website: Digital Intimacies 9 - Call For
Papers <https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/digital-intimacies-9/>. If you
have any further questions, please feel free to email us at
digitalcultures at hass.uq.edu.au.



As always, please feel free to forward to any interested colleagues.



References:

Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the
possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.





Cheers,

The Digital Intimacies 9 organising crew.




-- 

*ANDREA ALARCON*

*+ The Usefulness of Open Events: Navigating Professional Spaces of Urban
Meetups <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448211072827>. *


*+ Postdoctoral Fellow*+ University of Queensland,  | DigitalCultures and
Societies <https://hass.uq.edu.au/Digital-Cultures-and-Societies>| Faculty
of Humanities and Social Sciences

+ www.andreaalarcon.net
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