[Bilimsel Haber] CONF. CFP: The Virtual Transformation of the Public Sphere, 15-18 December 2010, Chandigarh - abstract due by August 30, 2010

[Gonul Pultar]

		*The Virtual Transformation of the Public Sphere*
*Location:* 	India 
<http://www.h-net.org/announce/geography.cgi?geography=India>

	

	

	

XIII International Conference
Theme: "The Virtual Transformation of the Public Sphere"
15-18 December 2010
Venue: Park View Hotel, Chandigarh, India

The thirteenth International Conference of the Forum on Contemporary 
Theory will be held in Chandigarh from the 15th to 18th December 2010 in 
collaboration with the Department of English, Panjab University.

Thematic Introduction
Ever since the 1989 publication of Jurgen Habermas' The Structural 
Transformation of the Public Sphere in English, theorists from a wide 
variety of disciplines have engaged with the Habermasian notion of the 
public sphere, its relation to bourgeois society and class formation in 
general, its traction with minority cultures, its conception of gender 
and its separation of spheres between the public and the private. An 
important thesis of Habermas's text was what he saw as the degeneration 
of a rationally based mode of public deliberation into a consumerist 
society dominated by a mass media that was itself compromised by its 
relationship with the State. His critics, in turn, have argued that such 
a transformation was not in fact a degeneration but a marker of a more 
egalitarian and democratic public culture. This conference seeks to 
re-examine the contours of this debate in the light of the significant 
transformations in digital technology and human communication that have 
taken place over the last few decades.

The rapid expansion of the internet, along with email communications, 
online forums, social blogging and social connectivity websites have 
transformed the ways in which individuals interact and communicate with 
each other in fundamental ways. The transformations have not only been 
drastic in terms of how internet-connected individuals organize the 
daily routines of their personal lives but it has also affected in many 
ways their own self-fashioning as private and public individuals. The 
rapid changes have also meant fundamental structural changes in the 
institutions that have traditionally served as key elements of societal 
communication and deliberation. For instance, as more individuals 
communicate via email and as more enterprises advertise online, the U.S. 
Postal service currently faces a severe shortage in revenue and is 
almost certainly positioned to see cutbacks. As more readers choose to 
access their latest news coverage online (often at no cost), many local 
and indeed national newspapers in the U.S. have found their advertising 
and subscriptions revenues dwindle often resulting in bankruptcy. In the 
meantime within a decade of its existence, "google" has become a 
commonly used verb, "friending" someone has become an (almost) 
competitive sport and the blogosphere has shown evidence of layers of 
mutually "following" bloggers that can only be described as a rhizomatic 
array of mutual enchantments. And if the internet has become the base 
for a newly ordered public and commercial sphere (think online banking 
and shopping here), corollary devices that use the internet along with 
advanced GPS positioning technology (think Smartphones and particularly 
the IPhone here), have arguably made their increasingly dependent users 
the cyborgs that visionary theorists in the past had long anticipated.

We have seen, in short, at least in the world of the internet-connected, 
a "virtual" transformation of the public sphere -- a transformation as 
"real" as "virtual" can get. This conference seeks to examine the 
multiple sites of this transformation as well as the many inequities, 
challenges and silences that it may conceal. Our aim is to cast a wide 
net on a range of issues: how have digital technologies transformed our 
engagement with human creativity and communication? How has, for 
instance, our increased access to electronic texts and databases 
(whether through Project Gutenberg or Google Books to name only two), 
affected the ways in which we go about leading our lives, not only as 
scholars, but also as lay citizens? How have such technologies affected 
our notion of the "literary" and its genres? To give a specific example: 
how are our literary theories of the genre of "autobiography" affected 
by the proliferation of personal web pages and tweets? Or, to turn to a 
different discipline, how have art historians and other scholars of 
visual culture reconceptualized some of the foundational theories and 
methods of their field in the flurry of visual dissemination enabled by 
new media technologies? What, in short, are the implications and 
possibilities of the digital humanities? And, to what extent can digital 
technologies and the new media help foreground the centrality of the 
humanities and art to public culture and social life?

Our aim in considering the virtual transformation of the public sphere 
is neither to be uncritically celebratory nor to be unduly cynical. 
Rather, we hope to gather scholars from a variety of disciplinary and 
intellectual backgrounds who are interested in reflecting on these 
transformations and theorizing them in relation to issues of power, 
justice, privacy, identity, political deliberation, civic society and 
also of aesthetics, consumption, and pleasure.

The following topics are intended to help those who are interested in 
participating in the conference in formulating their proposals for 
submission. However, they are only suggestive, and not exhaustive:

(a) What are the limits of the public/private divide and how do the new 
media inscribe them?
(b) How are the categories of "literature" or "art" affected by the 
dissemination in the new media of a number of mixed genre texts and new 
modes of visuality?
(c) How are patterns and habits of "reading" changed when individuals 
turn to the new media for access to more conventionally created texts 
such as novels?
(d) How are our theories of the "human" revised or modified when human 
beings increasingly engage in the virtual sphere?
(e) Do the new media help or hurt the growth of literacy? How does our 
understanding of "literacy" change when we consider it in relation to 
new media?
(f) What is the nature of "imagined communities" on the internet?
(g) How do issues of anonymity mediate public discourse on the internet?
(h) How do the still-evolving social conventions of email disrupt or 
reinforce existing social relations?
(i) What are the social dynamics of "blogging"?
(j) Is there a technological divide of access across different 
communities and if so, how are we to best identify it?
(k) How does the global nature of internet discourse radically change 
earlier notions of the Public Sphere?
(l) How does active participation in online communities affect the ways 
in which contemporary individuals fashion their identities?
(m) What are the potential strengths and drawbacks of new digital 
technologies in the research lives of scholars?
(n) How can the new media help in the dissemination of the humanities 
and the arts in the world at large?
(o) Can the digital humanities "save" the humanities from their 
allegedly slipping hold on the public imagination?

Special Session
In conformity with our earlier practice, a plenary session on a regional 
text will be one of the special features of the conference schedule. 
This year's choice for the panel is Gurdial Singh's novel Unhoye (1966), 
translated into English by Rana Nayar as The Survivors (New Delhi: Katha 
India Library, 2005). A distinguished Punjabi writer of our time, 
Gurdial Singh has received numerous awards including the Jnanpith 
Literary Award for his outstanding contribution to Indian literature. 
The Survivors is a novel about how ordinary individuals in a small town 
in the Malwa region of Punjab in India strive to maintain their dignity 
and self-respect against injustice and oppression perpetrated by a 
hierarchical social order that continues to thrive despite the nation's 
independence. By focusing upon the disintegration of community life 
under the pressures of the process of modernization, the novel addresses 
several connected issues of national importance such as the persistence 
of the caste system; the widening gap between the rich and the poor 
under globalization; the disintegration of kinship culture and community 
life; and the general impact of Western modernity on social and 
religious practices. While reflecting, like Thomas Hardy and R. K. 
Narayan, on the life of a specific region in the Punjab in 
post-independence India, the novel tries to capture stylistically the 
subtle nuances of the regional dialect in a poetic manner. This could be 
an indicator of a new direction in Indian literature which pays more 
attention to the invocation of a culture through its linguistic 
resources than to the negotiation of grand themes under the influence of 
world literature. It is in the creative exploitation of the poetics of 
the local that the strength of The Survivors lies.

Submission Deadline
500-word abstract or proposal is due by August 30, 2010. The abstract 
should have a title for the presentation along with the name and 
institutional affiliation of the presenter and should be mailed as an 
email attachment to Gaurav Desai, the Convener of the Conference 
(gaurav at tulane.edu). Complete papers should be limited to 12 pages 
(approximately 20 minutes of reading time). A longer version may be 
submitted for possible publication in the Journal of Contemporary 
Thought or in the conference volume brought out by the Forum. The 
completed paper should reach the Convener of the Conference by November 
15, 2010.

Conference Volume
Select papers from the conference and from those submitted in response 
to the "Call for Papers" will be included in the conference volume, 
which will be ready for formal release at the 2011 conference of the 
Forum. Completed papers should reach the Conference Convener as email 
attachments by May 1, 2011.

Registration Deadline
The last date for receiving the registration fee is September 15, 2010. 
The fee may be paid through a bank draft drawn in favor of Forum on 
Contemporary Theory on a Bank in Baroda. Overseas participants may pay 
the fee through checks drawn in favor of Forum on Contemporary Theory. 
The amount should be sent to the address of Forum on Contemporary Theory 
mentioned on this leaflet. We encourage participants to register early 
so that their accommodation at the Park View Hotel is assured. All 
participants need to be pre-registered. The registration fee is 
non-refundable. Each participant will be sharing his/her room with 
another participant, as there are no rooms with single beds in the hotel.

1. Participant from India (member of the Forum) Rs.5000/
2. Participant from India (non-member) Rs.6000/
3. Overseas Participant (non-SAARC countries) US $400/
4. Overseas Participant (SAARC countries) US $150/
5. Local Participant (member of the Forum) Rs.1500/
6. Local Participant (non-member) Rs.3000/
7. Student Participant (from Panjab University) Rs.500/

The registration fee from the outstation participant will cover room 
rent and breakfast and lunch from 15th December to the afternoon of 18th 
December, and cost of the conference volume dedicated to the twelfth 
international conference held in Trivandrum. The fee from the local 
participant will cover lunch, conference tea and the cost of the 
conference volume. The participants should arrive on December 15th and 
stay on until the afternoon of December 18. The conference will begin at 
about 9 am on the 16th and will be over with lunch on the 18th December. 
15th December is reserved for local sight seeing for which an additional 
fee will be charged.

Keynote Speaker
Nicholas D. Mirzoeff, Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and 
Communication, New York University will deliver the keynote address on 
the topic "Global Visualities in Crisis." He has taught at State 
University of New York at Stony Brook, University of Wisconsin at 
Madison, University of Texas at Austin, University of California at 
Irvine, and University of Warwick, England. His publications include The 
Right to Look: A Counter-History of Visuality (Duke University Press, 
forthcoming 2010-11); Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global 
Visual Culture (Routledge, 2005); An Introduction to Visual Culture 
(Routledge,1999); Silent Poetry: Deafness, Sign and Visual Culture in 
Modern France (Princeton University Press, 1995); Bodyscape: Art, 
Modernity, and the Ideal Figure (Routledge, 1995). He has edited The 
Visual Culture Reader (Routledge, 1998) and Diaspora and Visual Culture: 
Representing Africans and Jews (Routledge, 2000). His research articles 
have appeared in such journals as Culture, Theory and Society; PMLA; 
Social Text; October; The Journal of Visual Culture; Radical History 
Review; Eighteenth Century Studies and as chapters in several critical 
anthologies.

For further information any of the following may be contacted:

Prafulla C. Kar
Convener, Forum on Contemporary Theory, Baroda
Tel: 0265-2338067 ®; (0265) 2320870 (O)
Email: prafullakar at gmail.com

Gaurav Desai
Convener of the Conference
Department of English
Tulane University, New Orleans, USA
Email: gaurav at tulane.edu

Rana Nayar
Local Convener
Head, Department of English
Panjab University, Chandigarh
Email: rananayar at gmail.com

	Prafulla Kar
Forum on Contemporary Theory
Baroda, India
prafullakar at gmail.com
Email: prafullakar at gmail.com <mailto:prafullakar at gmail.com>
Visit the website at http://www.fctworld.org

-------------- sonraki bölüm --------------
Bir HTML eklentisi temizlendi...
URL: <http://lists.kulturad.org/pipermail/bilimselhaber/attachments/20100603/632fc9cc/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- sonraki bölüm --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: dot.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 90 bytes
Desc: kullan?lam?yor
URL: <http://lists.kulturad.org/pipermail/bilimselhaber/attachments/20100603/632fc9cc/attachment-0001.gif>