[csaa-forum] [Call for Papers] Digital Intimacies 4: Porousness & Permutations

[Tama Leaver]

 Digital Intimacies 4: Porousness & Permutations
December 5, 6 & 7, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia

Digital Intimacies is now in its fourth year and continues to bring
scholars of digital culture together from across Australia and beyond,
across disciplines including media and communication, cultural studies,
sociology, and gender studies. This year’s symposium is convened by Amy
Dobson and Tama Leaver, and is hosted by Curtin University’s Centre for
Culture and Technology and the discipline of Internet Studies in the School
of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry.

As social media open up intimate lives and practices to public and
semi-public gazes, we are in the midst of important cultural contestations
over the meaning of intimacy.  How intimacy plays out in, and in relation
to, the digital has become a prominent concern in scholarship of digital
cultures, as well as in broader public debate. Intimacy is generally
understood as to do with the ‘personal’ and with ‘closeness’ — as
describing feelings or relationships that are most ‘inward to one’s
personhood’ (McGlotten, 2013). But, as much queer and social theory tells
us, intimacy is also socially and culturally constructed and sanctioned,
defined by institutions, laws, and social and cultural norms and practices.
Norms around various kinds of intimacies and intimate practices involving
media increasingly play out online, and via social media platforms. Digital
platforms are structured by a ‘like’ economy (Gerlitz and Helmond, 2013),
by drives towards the quantification of self (Lupton, 2016), and
algorithms, as well as algorithmic ‘imaginaries’ (Bucher, 2018; Carah and
Angus 2018). Digital intimacy has been described in this context as a new
kind of social capital (Lambert, 2016), as well as new media ‘genre’ (Raun,
2018). Practices of certain kinds of intimacies via the digital are
increasingly seen as vital to ‘successful’ and economically productive use
of social media, especially for cultural intermediaries and ‘internet
celebrities’ (Abidin, 2018). Simultaneously, many forms of intimacy and
communication are being encoded, aggregated, analysed and commercialized as
forms of big data, provoking difficult and unsettling questions about new
forms of surveillance, influence, and control, as well as distinct lack of
transparency around new practices and forms of governance, made publicly
visible around recent Cambridge Analytica scandals (Andrejevic, 2013;
Leaver, 2017).

We are calling for paper abstracts on the themes of digital media, digital
cultures, and intimacy, with particular interest in porousness and
permutations of every kind; that is, papers that map the flow between
boundaries – shifts and permeations of  practice and understanding towards
new forms, new configurations, and the unsettling existing norms in
unexpected and as yet unnamed ways.

Within these broadly understood boundaries of digital culture(s) and
digital intimacies we invite particular exploration of:
* how existing structures, boundaries and norms of intimacy are
constituted, reconstituted and made porous in terms of identities,
practices and platforms;
* how practices of intimacy via the digital can be challenged, changed and
new permutations emerge in terms of the social, cultural, and political;
* how ‘digital disruption’ (of various sorts) shapes, configures,
constitutes and impacts intimacy of every kind.

The single stream symposium will formally run for two days, December 5 and
6. Following the successful implementation at last year’s symposium, an
optional third day for more focused workshopping, writing, and project
planning, driven by the intersections made visible during the two
conference days, will be available of December 7th for those who wish to
participate.

Keynote speaker: Professor Jessica Ringrose from University College London;
further keynote speaker to be announced soon.

Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words to digitalintimacies at gmail.com by
June 30, 2018. We will send notifications of acceptances out by the end of
July.

We are hoping to make this a low-cost event, especially for students, but
there will be a small registration fee to cover costs.

Details at https://digint18.tumblr.com/cfp


-- 
Associate Professor Tama Leaver
Department of Internet Studies
Faculty of Humanities, MCCA, Curtin University
GPO Box U1987 Perth WA Australia 6845
Ph: (+61 8) 9266 1258
Email: t.leaver at curtin.edu.au
Web: www.tamaleaver.net
Twitter: @tamaleaver

CRICOS Provider Code: 00301J (WA)
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