[csaa-forum] Transformations cfp: The Internet as Politicising Instrument

[Warwick Mules]

CFP: Issue 23 
The Internet as Politicising Instrument

Transformations is calling for submissions for Issue 23: The Internet as
Politicising Instrument.

For this issue of Transformations, we invite papers that consider the gamut
of change that the Internet has provoked, drawing on Marcus Breen's
Uprising: the Internet's Unintended Consequences (Common Ground Publishing,
Champaign, IL, 2011).

In Uprising Marcus Breen employs Walter Benjamin's arguments about art as a
'politicising instrument ... to allow for the proletariat to speak for
themselves' (p. 30). Following this assertion, we would like to invite
contributors to submit papers that reflect on this claim, to support,
challenge or deeply interrogate it. Discussions could include analysis of
the ways the Internet enables the 'proletariat' and the abject to speak for
themselves (following Julia Kristeva, Neil Larsen, Judith Butler, Arthur
Kroker and others). The creation of new styles of false consciousness is
open for discussion. Does the Internet require a new kind of speaking, one
which does not fit older forms of class discourse? And what role does art,
if any, play in this speaking? Can the Internet be understood as a new media
tool offering emancipation given the political economy of the media in
general? Are there lessons to be learned about proletarian political
mobilisation due to the Internet after the so-called Arab Spring and Occupy
Wall Street? Discussion about the meaning of 'proletarianisation' in the
Internet era could take up the interpretive work Breen offers on the new
definition of the term in an era when cultural 'stuff' is largely
unregulated in a neo-liberal context.

 Shifts in the circulation and availability of otherwise regulated media
differ from nation to nation and geographical region to region, suggesting
that proletarianisation due to the Internet takes a multiplicity of forms.
The implications for political mobilisation may offer unprecedented
opportunities for political action across the spectrum. Questions about the
challenges to the order of liberal democracy abound and are welcome from
either theoretical or empirical case study perspectives or in innovative
multidisciplinary modalities.


Abstracts (500 words): due 1st May 2012, with a view to submit articles by
1st September. 

Abstracts should be sent to:
The General Editor, Warwick Mules, at w.mules at bigpond.com

For submission guidelines and to view Transformations online go to:
http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/ 

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