[csaa-forum] Digital Intimacies 9: "life among the ruins" Dec 14+15 @ QUT

[Amy Dobson]

Kaya Dear Colleagues,

We are so pleased to see the Digital Intimacies symposium continue on, now in its 9th (!!) year. Following the fabulous Swinburne/ADM+S Sexy Messy symposium<https://secure-web.cisco.com/14INGdAcJGHuiZsVNSnhvpETfpviIjZOdA1_Rdnpd5YxGc1yxUfRqdwZwIdV1B51iKx8L96p3IGi-9olRGHAivhUh4TWRTneloIEAgnGqGWNbFzpj-MduZn5ra8V0M6TCOG05Pv5pV-aFCx-1kZJe4uT0PPjmbdqvjNljZpD1biPspx9qq2q2jO1c02X1y0P3eYhbXUk3OVDDDvQc4ZGdj6TQ-rfxNh7TUl9SVwEdFjxXLwlUbSt4fTlVspWOgnj6GEHvvQY9HIrqlnAatVLq4AeZTpm6ASAId0hald_FedxrbzsQwWLLwm2x6SSZyQSWO-ngNVpOVghs_9i1KO8NolE9tUqzmxHtGE3GdY2p44Z_TtmaWGmyb_23375kJVbIz_abUvWCFeDrxO0pILvzazxaGyPQC-v7qRn5dWyzH411df-h1D-pmLMIwfnkcuRIDuEEZeimLw8RDiN8UHksyQc2rwyaGLYmRyF428HzP-8/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.admscentre.org.au%2Fevent%2Fsexy-messy%2F> earlier this year, the Digital Intimacies 9 symposium is to be held at QUT December 14 + 15. Co-hosted by the QUT Digital Media Research Centre and the Digital Cultures & Societies group at UQ. The full CFP is copied below: abstracts now extended until Sept 1!

More information is available on the website here:

https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/digital-intimacies-9/

Please contact digitalcultures at hass.uq.edu.au<mailto:digitalcultures at hass.uq.edu.au> with any queries and feel free to share this CFP widely.

Best wishes,
Amy
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The Digital Intimacies 9 call for papers is now live! This year the theme is "life among the ruins":

 "Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes…" (Tsing, 2015, pp. 282).

Digital intimate publics express that the “vibe is off”, a sense that things aren’t quite right as we doom scroll on and on and on. A state of precarity and instability has left ruin and decay in its wake. From failed political systems, burnt-out utopias and bombed out landscapes, to the eerie and empty urban spaces of the mass industrial era, the persistent rubble left from (neo)colonisation and cultures threatened by climate crises, to recently obsolescent technologies, hyperlinks rotting away, and glitchy automated systems.

Despite the rubble seeming dead and inert, Anna Tsing (2015) reminds us that ruins are lively places where new multi-species and multi-cultures thrive. From a flattened out, ruined landscape, new possibilities grow. Ruins can be enclaves of hope as much as mourning, loss, and longing: they not only invoke nostalgic reflections, but open up space to dream and imagine the future.

Digital intimate publics share the affective experience of life amid the ruin. They are formed in circumstances of something being ‘off’, of being squeezed, constituted from positions of non-dominance. Digital intimacies come to be not in the gleaming corporate towers and cathedrals, but in the messy in-between spaces where resilient, creative practices of ‘making do’ emerge.

For Digital Intimacies 9 we ask in what ways are digital intimacies reckoning with the ruined structures they find themselves in? We invite submissions across disciplines to critically engage with, interpret, locate, theorise, or dissect the notion of life amid the ruins in abstract and creative ways. Additionally we encourage applicants to think broadly about the intersections between digital intimate publics and ruins to look with a hopeful eye for what may grow on the edges of our worlds.

We welcome papers and presentations in various formats exploring topics including but not restricted to:
·         Everyday responses to ruin.
·         Tactics and strategies of ‘making do’.
·         Obsolescent technologies and outdated digital media.
·         The politics of nostalgia and the future.
·         Stories, voices and practices from the margins.
·         Resistance, opposition and subversion in digital spaces.
·         Community, kinship and care during and after crises.
·         As well as papers covering broader questions and topics relating to digital intimacies.
References:
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.


To submit please email digitalcultures at hass.uq.edu.au<mailto:digitalcultures at hass.uq.edu.au> with a 200-300 word abstract and a 1-2 sentence bio by August 25th.

The symposium will be a hybrid event held from the 14th to the 15th of December at QUT Gardens Point campus (lift access available) and online.

Digital intimacies 9 is jointly hosted by the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology and Digital Cultures & Society at University of Queensland.

For more information check out our website: https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/digital-intimacies-9/. If you have any further questions please feel free to email Digital Cultures and Societies UQ at digitalcultures at hass.uq.edu.au<mailto:digitalcultures at hass.uq.edu.au>.


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Brady Robards (he/him)
Associate Professor of Sociology
Faculty of Arts, Monash University

Research Coordinator: School of Social Sciences<https://www.monash.edu/arts/social-sciences>
Co-Convenor: Monash Digital Cultures Research Group<https://www.monash.edu/arts/digital-cultures-research-group>
Associate Editor: Journal of Sociology<https://journals.sagepub.com/home/jos>
Publications<https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/brady-robards/publications/> | bradyrobards.com<https://bradyrobards.com/> | LGBTIQA+ Network<https://www.monash.edu/lgbtiqa> 🌈
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