[Discussion] media and cultural history

[Gonul Pultar]

CALL FOR PAPERS
A book collection of work on media and cultural history

RESIDUAL MEDIA

No phrase has been evacuated of meaning, and has outlived its critical
usefulness, faster than "new media."  If there is a reigning myth of
media,
it is that technological change necessarily involves the "new."  This
preoccupation risks neglecting the crucial role of continuity in the
historical process.  Rather than consisting solely of dramatic rupture,
the
dynamics of culture bump along unevenly, dragging the familiar into
novel
contexts.  Raymond Williams's attention to emergent, dominant, and
residual
forms has long alerted us to the varying forces of historical change and

to
the lacunae that result from examining the emergent in isolation.
Residual
Media will be a corrective to contemporary scholarship's fetishization
of
the "new."

Papers are sought for this edited collection of interdisciplinary
research
in cultural history exploring reconfigured, renewed, recycled, disposed,

neglected, abandoned, and trashed media technologies and practices.
What
is the process by which media, and their related devices, texts,
objects,
spaces and competencies, fade away?  How do some - whether in archives
or
attics, minds or training manuals - become the background for the
introduction of other forms?  In what manner do they reappear as
environmental problems, as the "new" elsewhere, as collectables, as
memories, and as art?  What are the qualities of our everyday engagement

with the half-life of media forms and practices?  Residual Media will
bring
together original scholarly work on these and related issues, combining
theoretical essays on the problems of media historiography with studies
of
specific residual forms, practices and materials.  Work may investigate
any
number of visual, sound, projection, broadcast, and writing
technologies.  Proposals are due January 15, 2003, preferably sent by
email.  They will include a 250-word description of the research, a
sample
bibliography and a one-paragraph author's biography.

Send proposals to:

Dr. Charles Acland
Associate Professor
Communication Studies
Concordia University
7141 Sherbrooke St. W.
Montreal, QC  H4B 1R6
Canada

Email  craclan@alcor.concordia.ca
Fax  514-848-4257
Phone for 2002-2003:  612-825-9060

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Gilbert B. Rodman
Associate Professor
Department of Communication
University of South Florida
<gbrodman@mindspring.com>