Call for Papers
Digital Cultures: Knowledge / Culture / Technology
International Conference
co-hosted by the Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC), Leuphana University of Lüneburg, and the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), Western Sydney University, as part of the Knowledge/Culture Series
Initiators: Armin Beverungen (CDC), Ned Rossiter (ICS)

The advent and ubiquity of digital media technologies precipitate a profound transformation of the spheres of knowledge and circuits of culture. Simultaneously, the background operation of digital systems in routines of daily life increasingly obscures the materiality and meaning of technologically induced change. Computational architectures of algorithmic governance prevail across a vast and differentiated range of institutional settings and organizational practices. Car assembly plants, warehousing, shipping ports, sensor cities, agriculture, government agencies, university campuses. These are just some of the infrastructural sites overseen by software operations designed to extract value, coordinate practices and manage populations in real-time. While Silicon Valley holds dominant sway over the design and production of the artefacts, practices and institutions that mark digital cultures, the architectures and infrastructures of its operations are continually rebuilt, hacked, broken and maintained within a proliferation of sites across the globe.

To analytically grasp the emerging transformations requires media and cultural studies to inquire into the epochal changes taking place with the proliferation of digital media technologies. While in many ways the digital turn has long been in process, its cultural features and effects are far from even or comprehensively known. Research needs to attend to the infrastructural and environmental registrations of the digital. Critical historiographies attend to the world-making capacities of digital cultures, situating the massive diversity of practices within specific technical systems, geocultural dynamics and geopolitical forces. At the same time the contemporaneity of digital cultures invites new methods that draw on digital media technologies as tools, and, more importantly, that engage the intersection between media technologies, cultural practices and institutional settings. New organizational forms in digital economies, new forms of association and sociality, and new subjectivizations generated from changing human-machine configurations are among the primary manifestations of the digital that challenge disciplinary capacities in terms of method. The empirics of the digital, in other words, signals a transversality at the level of disciplinarity, methods and knowledge production.

This conference brings together research concerned with studying digital cultures and the ways that digital media technologies transform contemporary culture, society and economy. The hosts specifically encourage approaches to digital cultures emerging from media and cultural theory, and transnational currents of communications, media and science and technology studies. We also explicitly invite researchers from digital humanities, digital anthropology, digital sociology, gender studies, postcolonial studies, urban studies, architecture, organization studies, environmental studies, geography and computer science to engage in this endeavor to develop a critical humanities and cultural studies alert to the operations, materialities and politics of digital cultures.

The conference will address and invites contributions to the following key themes, which characterize the technological future-present:
- Historiographies of Digital Cultures
- Environmental Media, Media Ecologies and the Technosphere
- Platforms, Commons and Organization
- Biohacking, Quantification and Data Subjectivities
- Digital Publics, Movements and Populisms
- Contemporary Futures and Anticipatory Modelling

Submissions
Submissions of individual contributions or plenaries (3–4 speakers/discussants plus chairs) are invited, addressing each or a cross-section of the themes, which will be complemented by a series of keynote speakers, artist talks and spotlight panels with invited speakers addressing key debates within and between these themes.

Applications must be submitted electronically in PDF format. Please submit abstracts for individual contributions (500 words max.) or panels (1000 words max.). All submissions must include: a title for the contribution or panel; a list of speakers and (for panels) chairs; a clear indication of the primary theme to which the submission is intended to contribute; at least three keywords; and short bios (200 words max.) for all speakers and (for panels) chairs involved.

Please send your submissions to: submissionsdigitalculturesconference.org

The deadline for submissions is 30th March 2018.

There will be a small conference registration fee of approximately 120 EUR, with exemptions for PhD students and under/non-salaried contributors, to cover the costs of catering for three conference days, including the conference dinner. Further registration details will be made available in April 2018.

Childcare will be provided. We will ask you to state your needs and the number and age of your children during the registration process. Please feel free to get in touch beforehand if you have any questions.