Call for submissions for an anthology on pop culture and nature
edited by Johannes Springer, Thomas Dören and Jochen Bonz

Looking back on the first decade of our century, various
characteristics of this time turn up as self-evident in everyday
life. Without any doubt, the notion of nature is representing such
a topos. Over the last years symbolic inscriptions into nature
have become apparent in tremendous cumulation: in literature,
music, visual culture and other social and cultural activities and
movements.

Thus, full beards have been adopted in a reflexive play with
naturalness and masculinity. Swarming collectives have improvised
hypnotic free-jazz in Canadian forests. Countercultural
counterurbanisation is weightily back on the (research) agenda.
Like nature as sonic ressource is reliving an inflation, hiking
is promoted zealously in hip fanzines. But productions and studies
of popcultures are not the only domain, where a palpable move
towards nature is detectable: this impetus seems to capture all
societal scopes.

This can be examplified in the humanities and social sciences.
Explanation patterns determined by social categories are
increasingly displaced by natural justifications. In such a way
conceptions of humans have changed from thinking them as social
beings to interpret them in terms of need satisfaction. Still
dominating the 1990s in its multifaceted and contradictory
manifestations, poststructuralist constructivism (Foucault,
Derrida, Lacan, Butler) is largely detached today - for instance
by actor-network-theory, which tends to substantialize the actor
and is furthermore monading the social. Instead of thinking
motivations of individuals via their identifications with social
conventions, today they are comprehended as affects - skipping
comparable collective validity. Accordingly, collectivization is
to a lesser extent understood by means of symbolic orders, but
through animalistic-instinctual operations like swarming. These
are just a few examples for a dispositif, to use Michel
Foucault's term for the signs of a time: the motivation of
individual, corporeal, psychic, and also collective, social,
political, if nothing else economic relations.

Our book aims to investigate the popcultural open strips, that
have been cut towards nature, and respectively through the thicket
of naturalization in recent years. Pop seems to be an eminently
appropriate parameter to examine the dispositif nature to us,
because it has continuously excelled as an intriguing double
function over the last 50 years. On the one hand, pop has appeared
as an exceptionally subtle seismograph, which has indicated
societal developments by culminating them into explicit exposure.
And on the other, popculture has produced alternatives, for
instance the big subcultures like mods, hippies and punk and
their countercultural articulations and values. Encouraged by
irritating ways of dealing with nature - like the literature of
Dietmar Dath, the fashion of Cosmic Wonder, the photographs of
Mark Bothwick, the musical and social experiments of New Weird
America or Jewelled Antlers, Peter Coffin's installations, the
films of Ben Rivers, Kelly Reichardt, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze,
Charlie Kaufman, cassettelabels like Sloow Tapes or
multimedia-phenomenom Will Oldham - we assume in the relation of
pop with nature generally an accordant double function. And
correspondingly: a specifically multilayered, idiosyncratic and
complex interaction with the phenomenon.

Submissions are solicited on issues related to any of these topics:

Nature & Utopia
Nature & Heterotopy
Nature & the Body
Nature & Fashion
Nature & the Idyllic
Nature & Authenticity
Natur & the Sonic
Natur & the Supernatural
Natur & Fear
Natur & the Dionysian

Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines including geography,
media and communication studies, cultural studies, film studies,
sociology, gender studies, anthropology are invited to present
reflections in the form of full length articles and shorter essays
on these topics at the example of filmic representations,
photography, music, lyrics, performances, cover artworks etc.

Contributions are welcome in both german or english language.
Fully detailed CFP (also in German) on request.

Please submit proposals for contributions until April 1, 2010 to:
doerengmx.net

Notification of acceptance of proposals: April 30, 2010.

Deadline for submission of manuscripts for accepted proposals:
1 September 2010.

Expected Publication Date: Spring 2011