[csaa-forum] Accidental Environments- call for abstracts Transformations

[Warwick Mules]

Dear colleagues

Transformations is seeking abstracts for articles to be published in 2006 on
the topic of Accidental Environments.


Abstracts (500 words) to be submitted by 16th June, 2006
Abstracts should be sent to the General Editor, Warwick Mules.
w.mules at cqu.edu.au <mailto:w.mules at cqu.edu.au>
(with a view to submitting completed drafts by mid-September 2006)

The journal can be accessed at

http://transformations.cqu.edu.au

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³The Accident is not an exception or a sickness of our apolitical regimes;
nor it is a correctable defect of our civilization: it is the natural
consequence of our science, our politics, and our morality.² - Octavio Paz,
Conjunctions and Disjunctions.
 
This issue of Transformations seeks submissions that explore, describe,
translate and transform ³accidental environments².
Accidents happen by chance. They are seen as the mark of a failure to
maintain control of an environment. But can accidents be seen in another
way, as productive in the sense that seemingly incongruous things and events
coincide or collide and together create possibilities and release
potentials. They produce ³events².
An environment is a fluid milieu of intermingling forces that condition the
many contexts of life. Environments are forms of immanence that make life
livable, but within certain constraints, liberties and conditions.
Environments are permeable‹they always exceed the dictates of science,
capital and politics that try to control and contain them. The body, the
biosphere are environments that exceed their discursive boundaries.
An accidental environment is one constituted on the possibility of accidents
happening. There are control environments in which the accident is reduced
to a particular instance of a more general problem, but there are also
creative environments which feed off the chance incident or encounter, and
the singularity of the event.
For this issue of Transformations we seek submissions that reflect on what
it might mean to speak of an accidental environment in either of its control
or creative forms: What is the status of the accident today? What is the
role of the accident in war? How do technology, global capital and
geopolitics affect or effect accidental environments?

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Dr. Warwick Mules
Editor, Transformations     http://transformations.cqu.edu.au
Senior Lecturer
Visual Media Studies
School of Humanities
Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Education
Central Queensland University
Bundaberg Campus
Bundaberg Queensland 4670
Phone: 07 41507142
Fax: 07 41507090
Mobile: 0412292541
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