[xmca] Fwd: ICA Pre-conference: Conditions of Mediation - 17 June 2013 at Birkbeck, University of London‏

[Bruce Robinson <bruce@brucerob.eu>]

May be of interest.

Bruce Robinson


-------- Original Message --------
From: Scott Rodgers <rodgers_scott@HOTMAIL.COM>
Sent: Tue Oct 02 00:10:59 GMT+01:00 2012
To: CYBERSPACE-AND-SOCIETY@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: ICA Pre-conference: Conditions of Mediation - 17 June 2013 at Birkbeck, University of London‏







**
With apologies for cross-posting **

 

Conditions
of Mediation: Phenomenological Approaches to Media, Technology and
Communication

 

2013
International Communication Association (ICA) Preconference

Philosophy,
Theory and Critique Division

17
June 2013, Birkbeck, University of London

 

Organizers:
Dr Scott Rodgers (s.rodgers@bbk.ac.uk)
and Dr Tim Markham (t.markham@bbk.ac.uk)

 

Confirmed
keynote speakers: Dr David Berry, Professor Nick Couldry, Professor Graham
Harman, Professor Lisa Parks, Professor Paddy Scannell.

 

 

Conference
Outline:

 

Media theory seems to have reached a moment in which it is
effectively orthodox to presume we must pay attention first and foremost to the
intricacies of everyday experience. Ethnographic audience studies, for example,
have attacked assumptions that there is a discrete relationship between media
content and audiences, arguing that media forms, content and technologies have
indeterminate and multifaceted significance within the daily rhythms and spaces
of their everyday lives. Studies of digital and networked media, meanwhile,
have put into question the very notion of ‘audiences’ as the starting point for
understanding mediated experience.

 

For some, accounting for the intricacies of everyday mediated
experience has implied asking people what they actually do with media. But for
others this is not enough: instead, the question is what constitutes the
conditions of media experience in the first place. How do political
configurations of discourses and inherited dispositions prefigure mediated
action? How do material arrangements themselves constitute environments for
mediated experience? How might we account for nonhuman agency, for example the
ways in which software objects interact not only with human perceptions but
also each other? Such questions point to a renewed confidence in explaining not
just how but also why media, technology and communication are experienced as
they are – all the while resisting a reversion to functionalism.

 

These interests in the very conditions of mediation suggest, if
sometimes only implicitly, an emerging interest in a phenomenology of media.
Indeed, phenomenology – broadly the structuring of perception – has seemingly
obvious relevance for recent academic interests in media experience. Yet its
use or invocation in media studies has been scattered. While this might simply
reflect the considerable diversity of phenomenological philosophies and their
applications, there have also been concerted efforts recently to rethink
phenomenology across the social sciences and humanities. Paired with recent
interests in mediated experience, the time seems apt to reassess what it might
mean to theorize media phenomenologically.

 

Conditions
of Mediation seeks to bring together scholars from a very wide range of
perspectives – such as media history, media archaeology, audience studies,
political theory, metaphysics, software studies, science and technology
studies, digital aesthetics, cultural geography and urban studies – to reflect
explicitly on the phenomenological groundings of their work on media. The
phenomenological thinking to which participants might connect will be
broad-based, ranging from core thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty and Sartre to those with looser affiliations to phenomenology per
se, for example Arendt, Bergson, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Garfinkel, Ingold, Latour,
Whitehead and Harman. 

 

In short, the overall aim is that this preconference goes beyond a
mere congregation of media phenomenologists. Instead, it will encourage
critical reflection on what various readings of phenomenology might offer media
and technology studies that other approaches cannot. Conversely, it will also
welcome reflections on the limits of phenomenological approaches in
philosophical, theoretical, political and empirical terms.

 

Format:

 

The pre-conference will feature two plenaries of keynote speakers,
as well as four-to-six panels of paper presentations selected from submissions
of abstracts. 

 

Paper
submission process:

 

Please send an abstract (max 200 words) of your paper to both
Scott Rodgers (s.rodgers@bbk.ac.uk)
and Tim Markham (t.markham@bbk.ac.uk)
by 20 November 2012. Authors will be informed regarding acceptance/rejection
for the preconference no later than December 20, 2012.

 

Venue:

 

The preconference will be hosted at Birkbeck, University of London
WC1E 7HX. Based in Bloomsbury, the intellectual heart of London and home to
several of the University of London’s constituent colleges, the Birkbeck campus
is just three tube stops away from the Hilton London Metropole (the ICA
conference hotel). The event will be held in the Clore Management Centre, which
offers an excellent lecture theatre, rooms for parallel streams and break-out
discussions as well as space for catering and informal networking.

 

For
further information:

 

http://conditionsofmediation.wordpress.com (conference
website)

 

___________________________________

 

Dr
Scott Rodgers

Lecturer
in Media Theory

Programme
Director, BA Journalism and Media

Department
of Media and Cultural Studies

Birkbeck, University of London

Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX

Tel:
+44 (0) 203 073 8370

Email:
s.rodgers@bbk.ac.uk

 

Blog
and personal website: http://www.publiclysited.com/

Birkbeck
website: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/culture/our-staff/scott-rodgers

 

 

 		 	   		  
-- 
Sent from Kaiten Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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