Author: nia

A one-day conference hosted by the Digital Culture Research Network, and supported by the Midlands3Cities DTP (M3C) Cohort Development Fund

Date: Friday 20th April 2018
Venue: University of Nottingham

Abstract Submission Deadline: Friday 9th February 2018

‘Digital⇌Culture 2018’ explores the varied links between digital and cultural processes. Digital tools such as social media, mobile devices, video games, data analysis infrastructures, and networked technologies increasingly permeate our everyday lives. As a result, the production and expression of ‘meanings’ or ‘values’ – like the experience and performance of identity, gender, embodied lived experience, political activism, linguistic engagement, knowledge and power relations – are increasingly co-constituted by digital platforms.

This one-day conference, which includes keynote speeches from Prof. Tim Jordan (University of Sussex, UK) and Dr. Katrin Tiidenberg (Aarhus University, Denmark), aims to bring together researchers from a wide array of disciplines with an interest in digital culture. Visit https://digitalculture2018.wordpress.com/
for more information and updates.

Submission

We invite proposals from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to present theoretical and empirical research in response, but not limited, to the following topics:

– How can we meaningfully study the relationship between digital platforms and the activities they enable?
– What is the relationship between features of digital platforms and the communicative acts they mediate?
– How can we understand the value landscape of digital entertainment?
– How do features of digital platforms become re-appropriated as resources for the construction and performance of identity, and to what extent does this in turn shape perceptions of the platform?
– How do digital platforms participate in knowledge-creation and the establishment of dominant discourses?
– How do digital platforms affect the aesthetic and artistic practices of mediation?

To encourage proposals from doctoral students, we are awarding six joint-travel/accommodation grants to successful proposals. Further details below. There will be no  fee charged for presenting at, or attending, this conference.

Submissions should follow the below format and be submitted to digitalculture2018@gmail.com by 23:00 GMT on Friday 9th February 2018.

Paper Title
Speaker Name
Speaker Contact Email
Abstract (Up to 250 words outlining the paper’s main arguments, methods, and relevance to the conference theme)
Speaker Biography (Up to 100 words)
Keywords (3 terms relevant to the paper)

Funding

We are pleased to offer six joint-travel/accommodation grants, each of which includes one night’s accommodation at the University of Nottingham (arranged by the organising committee) and up to £50 travel expenses.

The grant is open to all doctoral applicants, but at least three of the grants are reserved for non-M3C-funded applicants based at the DTP’s six institutions (Uni. Of Nottingham; Nottingham Trent; Birmingham City; Uni. of Birmingham; De Montfort; Uni. of Leicester). Those currently funded by M3C are not eligible to apply for this grant. This grant will only be offered to doctoral students whose papers have been accepted for the conference.

If you wish to apply for the grant, please complete a Grant Application Form which can be found here and submit it along with your abstract. Grants will be awarded on the basis of the conference organising committee’s collective consideration of submitted applications.

Betti Bodi

AHRC/M3C Doctoral Candidate

https://vpp.midlands3cities.ac.uk/x/488uAQ

Dept of Culture, Film and Media

University of Nottingham
Room B57, Trent Building
University Park

NG7 2RD

PLAY/PAUSE Symposium – 24^th January 2018, University of Birmingham, B15 2TT

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Gaming the System: Play, Procedure and Procedurality in Videogames and Virtual Reality

Procedures are embedded ways of understanding our cultural, social and political systems; they provide fixed guidelines and rules to be followed. While procedures are seemingly fixed, procedurality, on the other hand, is a constantly evolving mechanism for ‘creating, explaining or understanding processes’ (Bogost, 2007). For our inaugural event, PLAY/PAUSE welcomes papers that will analyse procedures and procedurality in relation to videogames and Virtual Reality (VR).

Does the procedurality of videogames offer us, as programmer Brie Code argues, the tools to adapt to a twenty-first-century ‘overwhelmed with shock, with information, with change’? Or are videogames an embodiment of the controlled degrees of freedom offered to individuals under late-capitalism and neoliberalism? Does VR technology offer unprecedented immediacy and the potential to be, as Jennifer Alsever calls it, ‘the ultimate empathy machine’? Or does it further indulge a misguided impulse towards mastery of our physical environment? And what of ‘metagames’, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux’s term for the games ‘occurring before, after, between and during games’? Are the hacks, speed-runs and fan-made mass-involvement games like Twitch Plays Pokemon (2014) a creative flourishing of the commons? Or do they simply indicate the outsourcing of labour by media industry discourses?

This symposium provides a meeting place for researchers within and outside the field of game studies, and seeks to broaden the academic consideration of videogames and VR: away from the consideration of them as niche, relatively new technologies, towards mediums that have the capacity to encourage and create academic discourses that reflect the cultures they are created in.

We welcome a broad range of proposals for 20-minute papers on the role or significance of procedurality in regards to (but not limited to) the following topics:

• The interplay between narrative and ludic elements of videogames
• Embodiment and modes of perception in videogames and/or VR
• Gaming, metagaming, and fan cultures
• Videogames and philosophy
• Representing and playing history in videogames
• The influence of videogames on other media, e.g. novels, films, plays, etc.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words, along with a bibliography and short bio, should be sent to playpauseuob@gmail.com by Friday 22nd December 2017. We particularly welcome proposals from PGRs and early career researchers.

PLAY/PAUSE is part of the Centre for Digital Cultures at Birmingham, fuelling academic discussion of Videogames and Virtual Reality.

Twitter: @PLAYPAUSE_UOB
Blog: playpauseuob@wordpress.com