CFP Conference: The Cultures of New India

CFP Conference: The Cultures of New India

30 January 2016 | University of Brighton
 
Plenary Speakers
Prof. Daya Thussu (Co-Director of India Media Centre, University of Westminster; author of Communicating India’s Soft Power: Buddha to Bollywood, Palgrave/Macmillan)
Dr Emma Dawson-Varughese (author of Reading New India, Bloomsbury)
 
The twenty-first century has been full of predictions of Indian success. Declarations of ‘India Rising’, ‘India Shining’, a new ‘Indian Century’ occur regularly. While the economies of Europe and the Americas have stagnated, the economies of Asia appear to be booming and a new generation of Indians now see themselves as the agents of globalization. Many aspects of Indian society appear transformed by this new prosperity with a new class of young, wealthy, urban Indians challenging the stereotypes of life in their country. Yet, commentators on this phenomenon are keen to point out that India’s move from Nehruvian values to liberalizing consumerism has produced a peculiarly Indian version of neoliberalism, one that responds to Indian values of the family and of the state just as much as to any, seemingly, universal ideas about wealth and freedom. At the same time, many of the inequalities of caste, class, gender and region persist. India’s rural poor remains beset by the challenges of the last century and appears immune to the supposed benefits of consumer citizenship that are enjoyed by an urban elite. Corruption, so often associated with India’s state infrastructure, remains the celebrity cause of the self-appointed representatives of Young India. Alongside the anxieties about women workers in the new service- sector industries, India has recently been confronted with a high-profile rape-crisis and a deeply embedded culture of misogyny.

• How then has culture, both from within and outwith India, responded to India’s new identity?
• What do literature, film and popular culture have to tell us about the nature of India’s modernity?
• How do the official and un-official versions of India’s self-presentation compare?
• How do international impressions of India sit with the nations self image?

We invite proposals (c300 words) for papers that investigate these questions. Among other topics, these might consider:

• Representations of youth culture
• Generational conflict
• Call centre work/ workers
• Gender and the new India
• Indian neoliberalism
• Contemporary Indian nationalities (NRI/PIO and beyond)
• Indian New Wave and Art Cinema
• Bollywood as a global brand
• Communalism and the New India
• India and social media
• The languages of Indian culture

DEADLINE: email your proposal and short bio to C21Writings@Brighton.ac.uk by 30 Sept 2015
  
Registration (£60/£40): http://bit.ly/1S7hGUz
Website: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/research/c21/events
 

CFP: Mediated Intimacies: Relationships, Bodies and Technology

Mediated Intimacies: Relationships, Bodies and Technology

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Journal of Gender Studies to be published March 2017 edited by Alison Winch, Feona Attwood, Jamie Hakim.
We are looking for 7000 word completed essays by 31st December 2015

In what ways does media convergence culture represent, intervene in, exploit and enable intimate relations? How is intimacy being reconfigured under neoliberalism?

On the one hand we are living in atomized and individualistic times where relationships are increasingly strategic and competitive. On the other the media has become, as Beverly Skeggs argues, intensely intimate. This special issue on mediated intimacies aims to explore how understandings of intimacy are (re)constructed and experienced, particularly in digital cultures. In addition, we are interested in the ways in which the apparently alienated entrepreneurial self is constructed through and by forging intimate connections and simultaneously how these networks are mined and monetized by corporate culture.

This special issue of Journal of Gender Studies is developed from a symposium held in July 2014 on Mediated Intimacies where the speakers explored, among other topics, girls’ online friendships, ‘expert’ sex advice in printed media, male seduction communities, and how pornography reconceptualises the very idea of intimacy itself.

Potential papers could explore the affective dimensions of intimate practices reflecting the pleasures and pains of life lived under neoliberalism, including how precarity and class impact on the ways in which intimacy is forged. Because digital culture is primarily corporate driven (Taylor 2014) we are interested in how user-generated media employs self-branding strategies. For example, in the refashioning of the body or gendered and sexual identities, or the ways in which intimacy can be a form of self-promotion.

Feminist and queer perspectives seek to expand the reach of what is constituted as belonging, love, connection and intimacy. Whereas recession culture has reestablished normative gender categories (Negra and Tasker 2014) contemporary digital cultures have the potential to challenge and rework gender and sexual identities (McGlotten 2013). This issue hopes to explore these productive tensions.

Potential papers could also explore how sexuality, sex, sexual knowledges and sexual pleasure function by looking, for example, at Do-It-Yourself porn, sexual subcultures and alternative sex practices. A final consideration underpinning this issue is how different intimacies intersect along axes of class, race, disability, age and geographical location.

Possible topics could include:

● adapting and resisting gendered and sexed identities
● forging new normative gendered identities
● mediatised kinship (families, parenthood and fertility)
● geolocation technology
● dating and hook up apps, sex dating and relationship cultures
● selfies
● role of experts (e.g. sex advisors and agony aunts), including their changing meaning in peer-driven contexts
● mediated romance
● fitness apps and body culture
● use of social networking sites, including instagram, Facebook, Twitter
● self-branding
● the mediation of friendship
● rebranding feminism
● pornography
● monetization of intimacy, including big data, content generation and PR/advertising

Please send 7000 word completed essays by 31st December 2015 through Scholar One Manuscripts: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjgs20/current.

Please direct enquiries to Alison Winch (a.winch@mdx.ac.uk), Feona Attwood (f.attwood@mdx.ac.uk) and Jamie Hakim (j.hakim@uea.ac.uk)

Publication schedule:

• 31 December 2015: Papers to peer reviewers

• March 2016: Comments to authors

• June 2016: Authors final revisions

• September 2016: Final acceptance

CFP: The Media and the Military

CFP: The Media and the Military

The Sage journal Media, Culture and Society (http://mcs.sagepub.com/) calls for proposed contributions to a planned themed issue with the working title ‘The Media and the Military’, co-edited by Katy Parry and John Corner. Military involvement in, and use of, media flows, including forms of social media, has developed significantly in the last decade. In relation to this, media strategies have developed too, with consequences both for military-political relations and military-civilian relations. New lines of visibility and emphasis have emerged alongside continuing strands of the invisible or marginalised.  An indication of the agenda of questions the issue proposes to address would include:

• How do unfolding narratives concerning the military sphere become interconnected with questions of foreign policy and what do these interconnections tell us about wider political debates on military-civil relations?
• How are ‘costs’ (diplomatic, economic and human, including forms of mental and physical injury) variously calculated in relation to the mediation of military activity?
• Do vernacular expressions of recent military experience (e.g. in social media, memoirs, forums) challenge or complement official accounts? How do they relate to the politics of ‘the war on terror’?
• How are national histories variously put to work or displaced in the mediation of contemporary military action?
• What evidence is available about the ways in which public perceptions of the military are constructed, about the tensions at work in that construction and about shifts in evaluation?

Proposals should be a maximum of 400 words and indicate not only the proposed topic but the kinds of approach, methods and forms of illustration/documentation/data to be employed. Proposals for shorter items (including discussion pieces) as well as for conventional length articles (max 8,000 words) are welcomed. The deadline for receipt is 20 September 2015. Proposals should be emailed to John Corner (J.R.Corner@leeds.ac.uk<mailto:J.R.Corner@leeds.ac.uk>) and Katy Parry (K.J.Parry@leeds.ac.uk<mailto:K.J.Parry@leeds.ac.uk>). Selection for invitations to submit first draft papers in the following year will follow within 6 weeks of the proposal deadline, along with details of the planned schedule.