Appel à contributions: The Body and the Digital

Type : appel à contributions

Lieu : Journeys Across Media conference, University of Reading (Royaume-Uni)

Date : 19 avril 2013

Deadline : 8 févier 2013

Contact :

Web : jam2013@pgr.reading.ac.uk

This year’s Journeys Across Media conference will take place on Friday 19th April, 2013, at the University of Reading. Please find attached our streamlined Call for Papers (including practice-led presentations/performances). The revised deadline for submission of abstracts is 8th February 2013. We would be grateful if you could pass this information on to interested parties.

 The JAM Organisers
Gary Cassidy, Edina Husanovic, Matthew McFrederick, Shelly Quirk, Johnmichael Rossi.
Journeys Across Media. The Body and The Digital

Friday 19th April 2013, University of Reading 2013 will mark the 11th anniversary of the annual Journeys Across Media (JAM) conference for postgraduate researchers, organised by postgraduates working in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading. JAM 2013 seeks to foster emerging scholarship that investigates interactions and relationships between the body and the digital.

French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty once stated: “The body is our general medium for having a world.” Today, critical approaches and performance/art/media practices concerned with phenomenology, embodiment and the haptic continue to evolve as they encounter, engage with, respond to, incorporate and influence digital cultures.
JAM 2013 would like to open a dialogue about relationships between the body and the digital, particularly as expressed within contemporary scholarship and practices. Our initial questions include: how does the body encounter digital media and how do digital media frames position the body – both in mainstream iterations, social media contexts and in performance contexts? How has digital technology affected the ways in which we understand body movement traditions and conventions, across regional and national borders?

 Topics may include, but are not restricted to:

 * Interactivity between digital languages and the body
* Sonic representations of the body in digital performance
 * The digitized body in performance
* The role of the body in digital games and virtual performance
* Post-colonial bodies in the contemporary moment
* Preparing the body for performance
* Notions of embodiment (e.g. violent, disabled, explicit)
* Traditions of corporeally-focused film, theatre and television
* Embodied spectatorship
 * Phenomenology of the lived, performed and screened body
 * The haunted body
 * Politics of the body
* Unconventional and other bodies

JAM 2013 invites submissions from PhD and MA/MPhil scholars conducting research in these areas and seeks to provide a broad, cross-medial discussion forum. Previous delegates have welcomed the opportunity to gain experience of presenting and developing their work, and to establish contacts with fellow postgraduate researchers and academic staff. Presenters who are not able to deliver their papers live are offered the option of presenting digitally, either via Skype or digitally recorded presentation. Non-presenting delegates are also strongly encouraged to attend.

 JAM has an ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Media Practice. Participants of both JAM 2011 and JAM 2012 have had their papers published by the journal. Please see Journal of Media Practice Volume 13, Issue 3, the most recent publication incorporating postgraduate papers originally delivered at JAM. Many of these focus on digitally-related performance and media practices, in the context of the 2013 conference theme, Time Tells. They have been written by scholars working (often through practice) in film, theatre, television, dance and performance.
 
New deadline for submission of abstracts (presentations AND practice-led work): 8th February 2013

 If you would like to deliver a fifteen-minute paper, please send a 250-word abstract and a 50-word biographical note to jam2013@pgr.reading.ac.uk