NewYorkScapes, NYUDH, and the Digital Culture/s Colloquium are thrilled to announce the 2020 Culture Mapping Symposium, to take place April 17-18 at NYU’s Washington Square campus. The deadline for submissions is February 17, 2020.
This year, we are also glad to be able to offer two travel grants for students and/or early career practitioners. Simply apply inside the submission form! Presenters can expect to hear back in March.
CULTURE MAPPING 2020: FUTURES
CALL FOR PAPERS, PROJECTS, AND WORKS-IN-PROGRESS
In Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media, scholar and feminist digital humanities practitioner Jacqueline Wernimont examines recordkeeping technologies used to account for human lives and bodies, beginning as early as the 15th century. The book, in part a robust critical historiography, challenges us to interrogate and engage mindfully with contemporary data issues and methods, and with the ways in which they shape our narratives regarding the value of lives and cultures.
In the introduction, Dr. Wernimont describes the project as “speculative and experimental, reading mediations and making a mess of apparent order in service of alternative futures.” By tracing the long, fraught histories of technologies of human enumeration, Numbered Lives refuses to take for granted the epistemological and ontological models undergirding quotidian quantum media; for Wernimont, it is through this interdisciplinary and media-archaeological that “we can [perhaps] find matrices that will help us create more just futures.”
Culture Mapping 2020 takes the occasion of a new decade to assemble scholars, students, artists, and other practitioners to reflect together on their own work and processes to a similar end: in service of alternative, capacious futures that feature justice, accessibility, and critical pedagogy as core concerns. We invite proposals that explore the intersection of culture studies, “mapping” in its myriad registers, and digital methods through the lens of this theme.
Proposals from across the humanities, arts, and social sciences are welcome. Faculty, librarians, graduate and undergraduate students, staff and administrators, and community members are all encouraged to participate. Potential areas of engagement include but are not limited to:
• Digital cartography & GIS as tools for humanities research and teaching
• Visualizing literary and historical materials, including speculative fiction
• Digital-born media, art, literature, and games that thematize futurity
• Resistant, anti-racist, decolonial, indigenous, and feminist mapping
• City and community planning; urban studies
• Speculative design and emerging technologies, including XR and participatory media
• Activist methodologies and pedagogies
• Data management planning and digital project maintenance
Submissions can take the form of traditional paper / project presentations (10-20 minutes), five-minute lightning talks, performances, installations, or roundtables (30-40 minutes). You may also propose a workshop on a methodology — technical or otherwise — in which you have expertise and which you feel would be of broad interest.
To submit a proposal, please complete the online submission form. The submission deadline is February 17, 2019.