[spectre] Call for Contributions to Sarai Reader 04 : Crisis/Media

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Call for Contributions to Sarai Reader 04 :  Crisis/Media

(apologies for cross posting to subscribers of Sarai Reader List, Nettime, 
FibreCulture, BytesforAll  & Commons-Law)

I. Introducing the Sarai Reader 

Sarai, (www.sarai.net) an interdisciplinary research and practice programme 
on the city and the media, at the Centre for the Study of Developing 
Societies  invites contributions (texts and images)
to Sarai Reader 04 : Crisis/Media

We also invite proposals to initiate and moderate discussions on the themes  
of the Sarai Reader 04 on the Reader List 
(http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list) with a view to the  
moderator(s) editing the transcripts of these discussions for publication in 
the Sarai Reader 04.

For an outline of the themes and concerns of Sarai Reader 04, see concept 
outline below. To know about the format of the articles that we invite, see 
'Guidelines for Submissions' below.

The Sarai Reader is an annual publication produced by Sarai/CSDS(Delhi). The 
contents of the Sarai Readers are available for free download from the Sarai 
website (see urls below)

 Previous Readers have included :

'The Public Domain' : Sarai Reader 01, 2001
(http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader1.html)

'The Cities of Everyday Life' :  Sarai Reader 02, 2002,
(http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader2.html ).

And 'Shaping Technologies' : Sarai Reader 03, 2003
(http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader3.html)

The Sarai Reader series aims at bringing together original, thoughtful,  
critical, reflective, well researched and provocative texts and essays by  
theorists, practitioners and activists, grouped under a core theme that 
expresses the interests of the Sarai in 
issues that relate media, information  and society in the contemporary world. 
The Sarai Readers have a wide international readership.

Sarai Reader 04 will be partly based on the presentations  made at a workshop 
jointly organized by  Sarai - CSDS and the Waag Society - "Crisis/Media : The 
Uncertain States of Reportage" . The workshop was held at Sarai-CSDS, Delhi 
in March 2003.
For more details of the contents of this workshop, see 
http://www.sarai.net/events/crisis_media/crisis_media.htm

Editorial Collective for Sarai Reader 04 : Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, 
Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Sarai, Delhi) and 
Geert Lovink  (Media Theorist & Internet Critic, Brisbane)

II. Crisis/Media : Concepts & Themes

 From the very beginning of this century we have hurtled on as if from crisis 
to crisis. As if all the ghosts of the 19th and the 20th centuries, decades 
of war, colonial plunder, totalitarian repression and the hardening of 
secterian animosity had suddenly decided to come home to roost in a frenzied 
attempt at revisiting on the present all the accumulated tragedies of the 
past that we had thought we had left behind us as we gingerly made our way 
into our times.

The images of planes crashing into skyscrapers, of entire cities being bombed 
into submission from the air, of occupying armies and fleeing civilians, of 
suicide bombers, ethnic cleansing  and riot police assaulting unarmed 
demonstrators have branded themselves on to our consciousness with mounting 
frequency. These are the substance of 
the meditations of all our mornings, as we pick up the day's newspaper, 
switch on the radio in the kitchen, or the television in the living room, or 
log on to the internet, We have witnessed flash floods, epidemics, economic 
collapse, mass migrations and an 
intensification of the regimes of surveillance and control on a near global 
scale. Our newspapers, our television sets, our radios, our websites  and our 
minds have become prisoners of war, and there seems to be no sign of a 
ceasefire in sight, at least as of now.

The world we live in has also witnessed an enormous increase in the scale and 
complexity of communicative possibilities. An explosion of the means of 
delivering news, comment and images at rapid speed over diverse media has 
meant dispersal as well as amplification of the dynamics of any event or 
process, anywhere in the world. Satellite 
communications, a new telecom revolution, cheap electronic devices, computers 
and the internet ensure that no moment goes un reported. There is no moment 
that is not potentially global anymore.

These are times for sober reflection, and that, precisely, is what we often 
find missing, as we open the newspaper, listen to the radio, or television. 
Yet, a variety of different, dissident, passionate and sane voices are also 
making themselves heard, through combinations of new and old media, as never 
before. The 'Paid For' news of the mainstream media is often exposed for what 
it is, even before it appears, by an increasingly vigilant network of 
independent local-global media initiatives. The numbers that turn out on the 
streets of the world's major capitals to protest against war seem to suggest 
that despite huge propaganda efforts, 'the spin' isn't working, at least not 
all of the time. We live, as the Chinese curse has it, in 'interesting times'.

This accumulation of situations of crisis in the first three years of our 
century, and their rapid, almost real time dissemination in the media, have 
no doubt precipitated new opportunities for communicative action and global 
reflection, just as they have signaled an onset of a severe crisis within the 
media - a crisis of over-stimulation and under-statement, of exaggeration and 
exhaustion, of censorship and spin-doctoring, of fear and favour. More than 
at any other time before, the power and reach of the media, the potential of 
the usage of technologies of information and communication for control or for 
freedom, and the several intertwined professional, cognitive and ethical 
dilemmas that media practitioners face on a daily basis. All these  require 
us to pause and take stock of the fact that the crises reported in the media 
have a bearing on the crisis of reporting in the media - That the media and 
the crisis that media require to be themselves today can no longer be seen as 
distinct categories, hence - CRISIS/MEDIA.

We are interested in recognizing the fact that media today are located 
precisely along the intersections and fault lines that connect and divide 
representations (media events and processes) and structural problems. The 
Reader aims to excavate the relationships 
between these structures and the representations that accompany them. Crisis 
Media respond as much to wars and ongoing ethnic conflicts as they do to 
environmental crises or the AIDS epidemic and the SARS panic. Given this 
situation, how can Crisis/Media go beyond their historically framed task of 
'correcting' mainstream opinions and actually experiment with other 
narratives? How can the global rise of mobile devices be utilized to 
'receive, transmit and broadcast' peoples' stories as they occur, and by 
doing so, break the separation between reporters and the reported?

Further, is it possible for us to begin to  debate and  problematize the 
whole notion of 'representation' itself, positing more immediate forms of  
testimony that resist  mediatization? These are open questions, with no 
satisfactory and coherent answers, but Sarai Reader 04 would like to take 
them on, so as to map new territories of thought about media practice.

A Preliminary List of Themes (these are not chapter or section 
headings, but point to areas of interest) could include :

The Political Economy of Contemporary Media Forms
Media Wars and Media in times of War : Weapons of Mass Distraction?
Taking Sides and Speaking Truth : The Reportage of Ethnic Conflict 
and Civil Unrest
Surveillance, Intelligence, Reportage : The Journalist and the Informer
Brand Disloyalty : Critiques and Analyses of Immaterial Capital in 
the Information Age
Aliens and Others : Media and Migration
Reporting the Crises of Everyday Life 
Re imagining Tactical Media
Evaluating Independent Media Strategies in the time of Globalization
Mobile Maverick Media : the Technology and Politics of Dispersed and 
Mobile Media Forms
Viral Media
Communicable Diseases : Epidemics as Information
The Body as Data
Crises of Representation : Ethics, Epistemics, Aesthetics
The Space for Free Speech

Sarai Reader 04 - Crisis/Media, seeks to engage with this situation by 
inviting a series of reflections by media practitioners (journalists, 
independent media activists, filmmakers,photographers, artists, commentators 
and editors) and  thinkers, writers, scholars, activists and critics. 

We are looking for incisive analysis, as well as passionate writing, for 
scholarly and theoretical rigour as well as for critical and imaginative 
depth. We invite essays, reportage, diaries and memoirs, entries from 
weblogs, edited compilations of online discussions, photo essays, image-text 
collages and interpretations of found visual material.

We are interested in testimonies from all theatres of global conflict - be 
they New York, London, Baghdad or Kabul, in reports from continuing crisis 
situations - in Kinshasa, Ahmedabad, Ramallah, and in essays and reflections 
that address the world from Delhi, Belgrade, Karachi, Beijing, Buenos Aires 
and Tehran. 

We are interested in anything from anywhere at all that makes for 
intelligent, provocative and critical encounters with the world we all live 
in. Contributors can also consider the structural, technological, rhetorical 
and aesthetic dimensions of understanding, interpreting and expressing 
aspects of what they see as situations of crisis. They can reflect on 
ecological crises, crisis within social institutions and the many unreported 
and unexamined crises of everyday life that be-devil the contemporary moment. 
Hate speech and unreflective testimonies of victim-hood are however not 
welcome.

The Sarai Reader 4, like the previous Sarai Readers, will be international in 
scope and content, while retaining a special emphasis on reflection about and 
from areas that normally lie outside the domain of mainstream discourses. We 
are particularly interested in cutting edge writing and contributions from 
South Asia, South and Central America, South East Asia, China, Tibet and 
Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Australia. This is not an 
expression of a 'regional' or 'third world' bias, rather it is an affirmation 
of the fact that some of the most exciting emergent voices are located in 
these regions. We of course welcome, innovative and critical contributions 
from Europe, North America and Japan. We are especially keen to shape the 
Reader in response to events such as the Next Five Minutes 4 Conference, and 
hope that some of the ideas that get generated in such events can find their 
way into the debates that the Reader hopes to embody.

If you feel these issues and questions are of interest to you. If your 
practice, thought, curiosities, research or creative activity has impelled 
you to think about some of these issues, we invite you to contribute to Sarai 
Reader 04 : Crisis/Media.

III. Guidelines for Submissions

Word Limit : 1500 - 4000 words

1.Submissions may be scholarly, journalistic, or literary - or a mix of 
these,  in the form of essays, papers, interviews, online discussions ordiary 
entries. All submission, unless specifically solicited, must be in English 
only.

2.Submissions must be sent by email in as text, or as rtf, or as word 
document or star office/open office attatchments. Articles may be accompanied 
by black and white photographs or drawings submitted in the tif format.

3.We urge all writers, to follow the Chicago Manual of Style, (CMS) in terms 
of footnotes, annotations and references. For more details about the CMS and 
an updated list of Frequently Asked Questions, see 
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq/cmosfaq.html

For a 'Quick Reference Guide to the Chicago Manual of Style' - 
especially relevant for citation style, see - 
http://www.library.wwu.edu/ref/Refhome/chicago.html

4.All contributions should be accompanied by a three/four line text 
introducing the author.

5.All submissions will be read by the editorial collective of the Sarai 
Reader 04 before the final selection is made. The editorial collective 
reserves the right not to publish any material sent to it for publication in 
the Sarai Reader on stylistic or editorial grounds. All contributors will be 
informed of the final decisions of the editorial collective vis a vis their 
contribution.

6.Copyright for all accepted contributions will remain with the authors, but 
Sarai reserves indefinitely the right to place any of the material accepted 
for publication on the public domain in print or electronic forms, and on the 
internet.

7.Accepted submissions will not be paid for, but authors are guaranteed a 
wide international readership. The Reader will be published in print, 
distributed in India and internationally, and will also be uploaded in a pdf 
form on to the Sarai website. All contributors whose work has been accepted 
for publication will receive two copies of the Reader.

IV. Where and When to send your Contributions

Last date for submission - December 1st 2003. (but please write as soon as 
possible to the editorial collective with a brief outline/abstract, not more 
than one page, of what you want to write about - this helps in designing the 
content of the reader). We expect to have the reader published by mid 
February 2003.

Please send in your outlines and abstracts, and images/graphic material to -

1. (for articles) to
Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Co Ordinator, Sarai Reader 04 Editorial Collective
(shuddha at sarai.net)

2. (for proposals to moderate online discussions on the Reader List) to
Monica Narula, List Administrator,  the Reader List
(monica at sarai.net)

3.(for images and/or graphic material) to
Monica Narula, Co Ordinator, Media Lab
(monica at sarai.net)