CFP: "Public Media, Private Media," May 2013

The MIT Comparative Media Studies (CMS) Program and Communications Forum have issued a call for papers and panels for their upcoming Media in Transition international conference, "Public Media, Private Media," to be held May 3-5, 2013, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. This installment of the annual conference seeks to explore the tenuous and shifting definitions of public and private spheres in the context of digital media, unprecedented digital tracking, reality television and confessional journalism, and intellectual property debates - all as framed by a long history of public sphere theory. 

From the CFP:

The distinction between public and private – where the line is drawn and how it is sometimes inverted, the ways that it is embraced or contested – says much about a culture. Media have been used to enable, define and police the shifting line between the two, so it is not surprising that the history of media change to some extent maps the history of these domains. Media in Transition 8 takes up the question of the shifting nature of the public and private at a moment of unparalleled connectivity, enabling new notions of the socially mediated public and unequalled levels of data extraction thanks to the quiet demands of our Kindles, iPhones, televisions and computers.  While this forces us to think in new ways about these long established categories, in fact the underlying concerns are rooted in deep historical practice.  MiT8 considers the ways in which specific media challenge or reinforce certain notions of the public or the private and especially the ways in which specific “texts” dramatize or imagine the public, the private and the boundary between them.  It takes as its foci three broad domains: personal identity, the civic (the public sphere) and intellectual property.

Broad topics include: "the anxieties of the private" in film, television, literature, and the Internet; celebrity and the public persona; the history of private-public discourse; consumption and media spaces; virtual publics; surveillance, monitors, and media traces; internet privacy and piracy; the fate of public libraries in the era of digital services (among others).

Submissions can be emailed to mit8@mit.edu and will be accepted on a rolling basis until Friday, March 1, 2013 (evaluations begin in November. Further instructions can be found in the Media in Transition 8th Annual Call for Papers. 

CFP: "I Live Here!: Redefining and Negotiating Notions of Public and Private,” February 2013

The North Carolina State Association of English Graduate Students has issued a call for papers for their graduate student conference in the humanities, to be held February 22-23, 2013 at Tompkins Hall in Raleigh, NC. The conference, "I Live Here: Redefining and Negotiating Notions of Public and Private," is broadly interested in the tenuous boundaries between public and private spheres.

From the CFP: 

With the current election season in full force, debates over social, economic, and political issues seem to increasingly reflect a tension between the public/private binary, and the ongoing conflict that results when the personal becomes political. Scholars are encouraged to explore how their own research and interests in English & Humanities makes a significant contribution to our understanding of this binary, be it in its current iteration, the historical development, or a diachronic snapshot of another cultural moment. 

We welcome submissions that re-frame existing and emerging research to interrogate the significance of the debate over public and private, as well as those that make strides toward understanding how our research might provide insight into our own current moment.

Broad topics include: the historical development of the public/private distinction; the changing boundaries in digital spaces; the relationship between the public/private distinction and literature, language, and film; the implications of the public/private debate for identity politics in general and/or specific populations.

Abstracts of 300 words are due by November 15, 2012. For more information visit the UPenn CFP post or email aegs.conference@gmail.com.

Second Meeting: September 24, 2012

The second meeting for "Publics and Politics" will be held next Monday, September 24th, 2012 in J. Walter Wilson 302 at 7pm. Dinner will be provided. We will be discussing selections from John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (original edition, 1971) and Walter Lippmann's The Phantom Public (1925). Readings are available over email and online here (log-in required).

  

Copies of John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems (1927), our reading for October 8th, will be distributed. We also hope to secure some dissertation presenters for upcoming weeks and finalize our meeting schedule. 

Last week's discussion of Locke and de Tocqueville raised some interesting questions about the origin of "feeling" or "desire" and the parameters of culture. We look forward, for next week, to a lively discussion of public opinion, intellect, and expectations of the individual for democratic political participation.

Event: Chris Dixon, "Reinventing Radicalism"

Tomorrow, activist and scholar Chris Dixon will give a talk at Brown University about the convergence of social movements and grassroots organizing.

  

From the event facebook page:

"Reinventing Radicalism: Anti-Authoritarian Activism in North America" will discuss how the last decade has seen the exciting convergence of anti-authoritarian radicalism and broader-based movements in the U.S. and Canada. Coming out of this convergence, a growing cohort of activists are developing shared politics, practices, and sensibilities based in overlapping areas of work. This cohort is a political tendency, the anti-authoritarian current, which cuts across a range of left social movements. What distinguishes this current is its commitment to combining anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist politics with grassroots organizing among ordinary, non-activist people. Drawing on in-depth interviews with organizers across North America, this presentation will trace the strands that have led into the anti-authoritarian current, explore the defining principles of its politics, and the discuss questions it poses for all of us committed to social transformation.

Chris Dixon is a scholar and longtime activist who received his PhD from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His writing has appeared in numerous book collections as well as periodicals such as Anarchist Studies, Left Turn, Social Movement Studies, and Upping the Anti. He is currently completing a book, tentatively titled Against and Beyond, based on interviews with anti-authoritarian organizers across the U.S. and Canada involved in broader-based movements.

This event will take place at 5:30 p.m. in Smith-Buonanno room 201. This lecture is the first in a series entitled "Global Resistance to Neoliberalism," and is sponsored by a Graduate International Colloquium grant from Brown University's Office of International Affairs. Those of you unable to attend can find a video of this talk hosted on vimeo.

First meeting: September 10, 2012

The first meeting for "Publics and Politics" will be held next Monday, September 10, 2012 at 12 pm--lunch will be provided.  We will be discussing selections from John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689) and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835-40).  Reading selections are available over email and online here (log in required).

  

Copies of the reading for the October 8 meeting, John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems (1927), will also be distributed.  Readings for the September 24 meeting will be uploaded online.  We also hope to finalize the schedule with the workshop during Monday's meeting, including participant presentations of dissertation work, as well as our visiting scholars to the workshop, so expect more information to be uploaded onto the site in the coming weeks.