[csaa-forum] CFP: Cunning Knowledge and Media Technologies - Platform: Journal of Media and Communication

[Christopher O'Neill]

Call for Papers: Cunning Knowledge and Media Technologies

*Platform: Journal of Media and Communication*

http://platformjmc.com

An interdisciplinary journal for early career researchers and graduate
students

Volume editor: Christopher O’Neill

Abstract submissions due: *5th of March, 2016*

Full paper submissions due: *20th of May, 2016*

Everyone is on the side of the cunning. Media, communications, and cultural
studies scholars have increasingly come to identify resistance with the
alacrity of Michel de Certeau’s walker, with the trickster whose clever
‘tactics’ always outwit the lumbering stupidities of state power and its
‘strategies’. Cunning knowledge comes from below, it is popular, it resists
codification and iteration, it responds to a given exigency *in the moment*,
it is defined by a certain *disposition*. Cunning belongs to those who, in
a state of lack, are driven to subvert majoritarian institutions and ways
of thinking. Theorists including Michel de Certeau, Guy Debord, Sarah
Kofman, Carlo Ginzburg, Donna Haraway, Marcel Detienne, Jean-Pierre
Vernant, Gilbert Simondon, and François Jullien have celebrated the
capacity for cunning to undermine instrumental or otherwise reductive
conceptions of knowledge.

But what happens when even the largest organs of state and corporate power
self-consciously seek to recuperate the power of the cunning for their own
ends? In Hesiod we read that Zeus swallowed the Greek goddess of cunning
Metis, for “fear that she might bring forth a thunderbolt stronger than his
own”. Analogously, Google has produced “a kind of cunning
world-wide-web-weaving”, Dan Mellamphy has argued in a previous issue of
*Platform*, it has “swallowed-up the ruse and intelligence of the internet”
by crafting a powerful, emergent, yet unstable archive, a bottom-up form of
administrative knowledge. Furthermore, the distinction Certeau makes
between the prescriptive spatial grammar of urban strategists, and the
colloquial *détournements* made by walkers, seems less secure today, as
pattern-of-life spatial analytics attempt to grasp the movement of the city *in
motion*, with all its associated rhythms and cadences.

This issue of *Platform* seeks papers which engage with the question: What
does ‘cunning’ signify today in the technological realm? Does cunning still
belong to those who lack power, or are the powerful today so powerful that
they lack not even lack? As the qualities associated with cunning, such as
adaptation, induction, speed, and resilience become adopted as normative
values in finance and statecraft, does cunning still possess the capacity
to disrupt (disruption itself perhaps now holding dubious critical
efficacy), or is there a need to consider new modes of critique, ‘new
weapons’, perhaps a reappraisal of the neglected virtues of slowness,
deliberation, even stasis? *Platform* seeks papers on all aspects related
to cunning and media & technology, including but not limited to:

-Hunting techniques (the venatic) & (state) surveillance, drones, etc.
-The relation between witchcraft, alchemy, sorcery, and modern technoscience
-Cunning as a gendered knowledge
-Cunning as an aspect of neo-liberal subjectivity
-Cunning and lack, aporia, poverty
-Cunning and medical technologies (e.g., health tracking technologies)
-Cunning as an embodied knowledge, its relation to gesture
-The relation between mimesis, trickery, and online self-identity and
self-representation
-The relation between haptic media and cunning techniques of
sleight-of-hand (prestidigitation)
-Cross cultural conceptions of cunning (e.g., comparing *metis*, *zhi*,
etc.)
-The relation between fortune-telling, soothsaying techniques, and
predictive analytics
-Cunning and design/craft
-Cunning and approaches to ‘queering’ normative knowledge practices
-Cunning and its relation to temporality and speed
-The relation between cunning and other forms of knowledge (e.g.,
*phronesis*, *sophia*, etc.)

Please send all enquiries and submissions to platformjmc at gmail.com.
Abstracts must be accompanied by a brief curriculum vitae and biographical
note, and should not exceed 350 words. Abstracts are to be submitted no
later than 5th of March, 2016. Full papers will be due by 20th of May 2016;
please be aware that acceptance of abstracts does not guarantee
publication. All submissions should be from early career researchers
(defined as being within a few years of completing their PhD.) or current
graduate students undertaking their Masters, PhD. or international
equivalent.

All eligible submissions will be sent for double-blind peer-review. Early
submission is highly encouraged as the review process will commence on
submission.

Note: Please read the submission guidelines before submitting work
<http://platformjmc.com/make-a-submission/guidelines/>. Submissions
received not in house style will not be accepted and authors will be asked
to resubmit their work with the correct formatting before it is sent for
review.

*Platform: Journal of Media and Communication* is a fully refereed,
open-access online graduate journal. Founded and published by the School of
Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne (Australia),
*Platform* was launched in November 2008.

*Platform* is refereed by an international board of established and
emerging scholars working across diverse fields in media and communication
studies, and is edited by graduate students at the University of Melbourne.
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