[csaa-forum] call for papers: 'Question Time'

[Dr Susan Yell]

Call for Papers

Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture
Special Issue, 39.3, 2006

Question Time: Modalities of Knowledge in an Information Culture

Editors: Paul Atkinson, Simon Cooper & Sue Yell, Monash University

This issue takes as its starting point the information gathering and
surveillance capacities of ICTS, and their applications in a range of
institutions and media genres. It invites papers to address the
implications of these capacities and their applications in an
information culture. In what ways does the current proliferation of
television and radio questionnaires and quizzes and of organisational
audits (e.g. in universities, research assessment exercises, publication
outputs, student evaluations) contribute to a ‘flattening’ of
knowledge?  Does the design and performance of these programs and audits
reduce knowledge, agency and the conception of the future into a choice
between variables?  Does the development and application of new
technologies capable of tracking and cataloguing social practices
represent a historically unprecedented compartmentalisation of
knowledge? Is there a privileging of only those events that can be
captured by electronic databases and the corresponding drive to find new
means of inscribing social practices and phenomena?  Are there relations
to be drawn between an apparent flattening of knowledge and an apparent
fashion for flattening organisational arrangements (e.g. changing
managerial structures)?

Contributors are invited to address issues associated with these changes
to knowledge structures, in particular:
· the link between media genres, communication technologies and
knowledge structures (including online databases and search engines such
as Google);
· the proliferation of quiz shows as well as television and radio
programs that use quizzes as a means of interacting with their
audiences;
· new forms of auditing and testing and their role in surveillance;
· the rise of the new audit culture as a means of assessing academic and
research activity (research assessment exercises in the UK, New Zealand
and Australia, publication outputs, and student evaluations).
· The journalistic staples of newspaper polling and opinion polls, etc.

Southern Review invites contributions (4000-6000 words) on the theme of
“Question Time”. Papers may be submitted as attachments to an email, and
should be double-spaced in A4 format and accompanied by an abstract
(maximum 100 words). Referencing is author-date (notes for contributors
and full details of house style are available on request).

The general aim of Southern Review, an interdisciplinary journal, is to
focus on the connections between communication and politics. Southern
Review is interested in communication and cultural technologies, their
histories, producers and audiences, policies and texts. It welcomes
articles that connect these areas either to arenas of legislative or
parliamentary politics, to governance of social organizations and the
institutions they constitute, or to broader negotiations of power.

paul.atkinson at arts.monash.edu.au
simon.cooper at arts.monash.edu.au
sue.yell at arts.monash.edu.au

Full articles due: 31 August, 2006.


--
Dr Susan Yell
Head, Communications & Writing
School of Humanities, Communications & Social Sciences
Monash University
Gippsland Campus, Churchill, VIC 3842
AUSTRALIA

ph. 61 3 5122 6442 or 9902 6442
fax 61 3 5122 6359 or 9902 6359
email sue.yell at arts.monash.edu.au

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