[spectre] PLACE - Location and Belonging in New Media Contexts [u]

[Geert Lovink [c]]

> Call for contributions - please circulate - apologies if you receive 
> this more than once.
>
> PLACE
> Location and Belonging in New Media Contexts.
>
> Edited by Danny Butt, Jon Bywater and Nova Paul
>
> James Clifford notes that "land" (whenua, ples, country, la tribu, 
> etc.) signifies the past in the future, a continuous, changing base of 
> political and cultural operations - while a political theory "which 
> sees everything as potentially realigned, cut, and mixed, has 
> difficulty with this material nexus of community". Indigenous 
> epistemologies have sophisticated structures for negotiating belonging 
> among communities who may become widely dispersed from their 
> homelands. New media, by contrast, demonstrates biases toward the the 
> dislocated: a cosmopolitanism implicitly located in the urban, where 
> communities form and fragment in "virtual" environments.
>
> However, questions of belonging and identification remain for those 
> who use new media networks. Knowledge in the new media environment may 
> circulate rapidly, but it is still located in human subjects who 
> develop knowledge and identification within physical and social 
> locations. The aim of this publication is to directly address silences 
> within new media discourse on place, as well as understand how 
> long-held attachments to place are transforming in the contemporary 
> media context.
>
> We currently have interest from international academic publishers in a 
> book on these issues to be published in coordination with the Cultural 
> Futures: Place, Ground and Practice in Asia Pacific New Media Arts 
> symposium in Auckland, December 2005 
> <http://culturalfutures.place.net.nz>. We are also interested in 
> soliciting writing from those not attending the event, including work 
> outside the regional focus of the symposium.
>
> Themes that may be addressed in the publication include:
>
> Place-based new media practices
> Migration and movement
> Indigeneity and colonisation
> Home and belonging
> New media and cultural transformation
> Globalisation and cosmopolitanism
> Local activism and social change
>
> Abstracts of 500 words, along with a 200 word bio should be sent to 
> <info at culturalfutures.place.net.nz> by October 14th 2005. We expect to 
> notify authors by the end of November 2005, and require chapters to be 
> completed by the end of February 2006, with the book to be published 
> later that year. We also intend to issue a further call for images and 
> pageworks in the future.
>
> Please direct any enquiries to the editors c/- Danny Butt 
> <danny at dannybutt.net>