The Deadline for submissions for our issue on Participation has been extended until June 25, 2014. Please circulate widely. We encourage academic papers, short polemics, criticism, works of art in any medium, and will consider less conventional proposals should they resonate well with the theme of the issue.
Read the entire Call here.
Issue Three’s guest editor, Ingrid Bejerman, remembers her time spent working with Gabriel García Márquez, who died recently. Read the whole piece here.
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I know this may sound absurd, but it’s nothing new to those of us who knew him: Gabriel García Márquez had the power to read minds. Never in my life have I felt so vulnerable and transparent as in the moments I was fortunate enough to spend in his company. I still haven’t grasped the full magnitude of his absence since his death one month ago, and so I appeal to a very basic Jewish principle: remembering a loved one as a way of keeping them alive.
My first words with El Maestro, as he is known across Latin America, were by telephone: a surprise job interview set up by Jaime Abello Banfi, who directs the Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism (FNPI), founded and chaired by Gabo to, as he put it, “take a break from academic training, and return to a primary system of practical workshops in small groups.”
Jaime had met me during one of these workshops, and wanted me to be his program coordinator at the Foundation’s headquarters in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. He was very intrigued by my typically diasporic Jewish roots: Brazilian by way of Argentina (half Sephardic by way of Turkey, half Ashkenazi by way of Ukraine), and thought that my background would extend the reach of the Foundation and give it a fuller Latin American dimension.
I was a 23-year-old girl who had just been hired by the leading São Paulo daily O Estado, where I had just landed a job that felt very innovative and exciting: writing for NetEstado, which in those days was the ‘online supplement’ of the newspaper. We were writing articles using non-linear narratives that were much more like the hopscotch of Cortázar than the linear grey prose that had come to characterize most newspapers. For many journalists at the end of the twentieth century, this web news thing was not journalism; it was a fad. But not for Gabo
IN CIRCULATION Media | Arts | Politics
Department of Art History & Communication Studies, McGill University
http://www.incirculation.ca
Issue 4, Vol. 1: To Participate: Global and Spatial Perspectives
Call for Papers
and Artworks
Deadline for submission:
EXTENDED June 25, 2014
What is participation? Who can participate and who cannot? Why participate? What is the role and what are the limits of technologies and platforms to contemporary forms of participation? What strategies and forms of collaboration are deployed to draw attention to or trouble conventions of gender, race, or faith? These questions are increasingly profiled and addressed in academic fields, art production, popular culture, and the media.
The Participatory Condition, for instance, an international colloquium hosted by Media@McGill in November 2013, was devoted to discussing such questions, and included a Participatory, Open, Online Course (or POOC). This issue of In Circulation is intended as a reply to this colloquium, and will add to the discussions it featured.
Models of participation are particular to local contexts, but often have consequences that extend to the global. Recent events such as the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and the interventions of Anonymous give evidence of calls for participation, and also pose geopolitically specific questions about the nature of participation. In Quebec at the moment, the question of political participation seems especially fraught because of events like the provincial student strike of 2012, when thousands of students and other citizens gathered to speak out against proposed tuition increases. Students organized protests and gained leverage for the movement using social media, but also employed significantly lower- tech strategies of participation including marches during which protestors would bang on pots, pans and casseroles. This issue of In Circulation aims to analyze within –and propose beyond – these frameworks. We are especially interested in how social networks function in contexts such as Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.
This interdisciplinary issue will focus on contributions from Art History and Communication Studies. It will give attention not only to objects of study that are participatory, but also to the range of participatory models active in research today – whether through interdisciplinarity or cross-cultural exchanges and collaborative research projects, particularly those engaging global perspectives.
Authors are encouraged to pursue the political climates, economic conditions, and understandings of community that have buttressed specific ways of participating, whether through media or artworks. Possible themes for papers could include the history of participation in art and communication and more recent trends such as social media, video games, interactive art, and issues of surveillance, politics and democracy. Other possible directions for contributions include the participatory impulse in relation to cyber-feminism, visual studies, and postcolonial theories in an effort to examine hegemonic flows of participation across nations, as well as within nations and communities and to move beyond dominant geographies of contemporary discussions of participation and seeking a broad ethnic diversity in contributors and frameworks.
There are contemporary forms of participation in art and media that seek to disrupt the participatory model by calling into question celebratory claims: in art history, participation has been approached as a strategy of the avant-garde used to disrupt complacency and work against the alienation apparent in modernity (Bourriaud) or to enact democracy and seemingly deeper forms of community (Bishop, Kester, Felshin, Lippard). Multisensory participatory experiences have also been theorized, putting stress on their political and cultural value, often to tease out their phenomenological workings (Drobnick, Fisher), their political and economic contexts (Canclini, Howes, Mosquera), and their orientation with respect to gender (Ahmed). Frameworks that trace the history of the very notion of participation and participatory cultures are also extensive (Carpentier, Delwiche, Henderson, Jenkins). Recent discussions have investigated the relations between participation, power, and democracy (Crawford, Barney), while others have questioned the assumption that participation is good in itself and have addressed issues of class, gender and race (Nakamura, Sterne). There are also formulations arguing for different forms of abstention or refusal to participate (Jurgenson, Portwood-Stacer).
Possible subjects for papers may include, but are not limited to:
– modes of journalism and reportage, either via conventional formats such as newspapers, or the voluntary self exposure of blogging, tweeting, and Facebook; as well as the strategies of reality television that encourage popular voting, and the promise of celebrity for everyday people
– curatorial and institutional approaches to commissioning temporary or public art projects from artists that instigate community engagement and collaboration
– video games; massively multiplayer online gaming
– geospatial focuses of global art histories; internationally oriented research networks that invite collaboration between scholars
– methods of activism that adapt forms of theatre, art, and music and vice versa
– institutional and governmental stewardship and funding of participatory practices
– models of participatory pedagogy.
In an effort to continue and move beyond the discussion that took place in Montreal last November 2013, this special issue on Participation will have a section dealing with Media@McGill’s International Colloquium on The Participatory Condition. Collaborative papers in response to the different sessions and/or to the Participatory, Open, Online Course (POOC) component are also welcome. (See http://www.pcond.ca and http://www.pcond.ca/pooc)
In Circulation is an interdisciplinary journal as such, we invite proposals from scholars, artists, researchers working in but not limited to: Communication Studies, Art History, Cultural Studies, English, Museum Studies, Library Sciences, History, and Philosophy.
Papers can be in English or French, and should include a 250-word abstract. Submissions should be in Chicago Style, and be formatted for blind review. We will accept .docx, .doc, or .rtf only. We accept both short pieces and longer articles, not to exceed 6,000 words. We also encourage art, multimedia or opinion-based submissions. Authors are responsible for clearing all copyright.
Examples of media/formats include: audio and electronic art, bio art, digital storytelling, game art, net art, open source and community-based practices, radio art, video art, short film, documentation of public interventions, performance and interdisciplinary practices.
In Circulation Issue 4, Vol. 1: To Participate: Global and Spatial Perspectives will be launched at Studio XX in the Fall 2014 and it will be accompanied by an exhibition featuring selected artworks.
Please send your submissions as an e-mail attachment to incirculation@gmail.com by May 30, 2014.
Any questions or inquiries should be sent to:
Guest Editors:
Mark Clintberg: mark.clintberg@gmail.com
Erandy Vergara: erandy.vergara-vargas@mail.mcgill.ca
Editorial Team:
Cheryl Thompson: cheryl.thompson@mail.mcgill.ca
Joseph Sannicandro: thenewobjective@gmail.co
View Issue 3 (web)
Download (pdf)
In Circulation: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Media | Arts | Politics
Department of Art History & Communication Studies
EDITORS:
Joseph Sannicandro & Cheryl Thompson
GUEST EDITOR:
Dr. Ingrid Bejerman
CREDITS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
Special thanks to the faculty and staff of the Department of Art History & Communication Studies at McGill University, and all our Peer Reviewers.
Cover Photograph: Phil Carpenter
Layout: Joseph Sannicandro
Logo: Pia Ravi
Our Fall 2013 issue was held up and has now become our Winter 2014 issue. Expect to see it posted here tomorrow, along with the CFP for Issue 4.
For now, we’d like to share the following “On Muckraking and Political Change,” recommended by the Hannah Arendt Center. (You can subscribe to the weekly Amor Mundi newsletter here. Every Sunday, this newsletter collects the Center’s favorite essays published throughout the week, to “help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.”)
Considering the theme of our current issue, this excerpt from Dean Starkman’s new book seems particularly apt. The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism catalogs the failure of the press to expose the wrongdoings that lead up to the financial crisis of 2008.
Read Dean Starkman’s “The Great Story”
The Hannah Arendt Center’s Roger Berkowitz reflects upon some of Starkman’s basic assumptions. In his book, Starkman turns to Walter Lippman:
It’s not enough for reporters and editors to struggle against great odds as many of them have been doing. It’s time to take the public into our confidence. The news about the news needs to be told. It needs to be told because, in the run-up to the global financial crisis, the professional press let the public down.
However, Berkowitz points out that only two years later, in Public Opinion, Lippman recognized that improving bad reporting doesn’t address the deeper problem of how the public forms its opinion, without sufficient leisure time or expertise to properly contextualize and weigh arguments of such importance. Lippman sought to insulate “experts” from “the democratic tempest when making decisions.” Which may very well be prudent advice. Berkowitz notes that this side of Lippman flies in the face of the civic minded optimism on display in Starkman’s book. He asks, “If we want to revitalize democracy can a revitalized muckraking journalism lead the way?”
Read Berkowitz’s “On Civic Journalism”
We might add to that question: “Perhaps the time has come for industrialization (and automated labour) to make good on its promise of granting the masses leisure time.” A true spirit of democratic engagement cannot occur without accessible mass education and a public with the leisure time to read and think critically about the issues of the day.
Special Issue
Journalism: Professionalization and Precarity
Since the rise of citizen reporters, blogging, wikis, and pro-am newsroom collaborations, both the professional and academic spheres have come to contest the very definition of a journalist. These analyses, however, often fail to consider the historical complexity of the processes of professionalization in journalism, its systematic institutionalization as an intellectual endeavor, and the fact that there is not – and never has been – a single unifying activity defined as journalism. The lack of a consensual body of knowledge within journalism studies as a field of inquiry, and journalism’s problematic status as a discipline within the critical humanities and the social sciences in general, only exacerbate this state of affairs.
While Mark Deuze notes that “journalism is and has been theorized, researched, studied and criticized world-wide by people coming from a wide variety of disciplines,” journalism itself is an arguably indefinable, uncertain, transmuting, multifarious, and extremely intricate object of inquiry. It is the definition of journalism itself which is rendered problematic, because ‘journalism’ – an ideology, a profession, a craft, a trade, the act of collecting/writing/editing/presenting of news or news articles, a style of writing, to name but a few – signifies multiple realities and representations, especially where differences from one national-cultural context to another are considered.
In their book Data Trash (1994), Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein write that in the field of digital acceleration, more information means less meaning. Drawing on their work, Franco “Bifo” Berardi points out that in “the sphere of the digital economy, the faster information circulates, the faster value is accumulated. But meaning slows down this process, as meaning needs time to be produced and to be elaborated and understood. So the acceleration of the info-flow implies an elimination of meaning.” Kroker and Weinstein’s virtual class anticipated the growing precarity of the cognitariat. Considering the historical role of the fourth estate, this virtualization of journalists should be cause for serious reflection.
Is journalism a profession? According to Chris Anderson, to date, very little has been written about the problem of journalistic expertise in either the communications or sociological literature. To further complicate matters, the little that has been written is marked by incongruity regarding concepts like profession, professionalism and professionalization, and what they mean in journalism.[1]
What is journalism? How is it theorized? Is there an object of study that can be called journalism? Is there an academic field of inquiry that can be called Journalism Studies? If so, what is its relationship to Communication Studies? And to the Social Sciences in general? What can a critique of the political economy of contemporary journalistic practices tell us? This issue seeks to situate the question of professionalization in the tension between media conglomeration on the one hand and the increased precarity of journalists and “citizen journalism” on the other.
Papers may include but are not limited to the following:
IN CIRCULATION is an interdisciplinary journal, and, as such, we invite proposals from scholars, artists, researchers working in but not limited to: Communication Studies, Art History, Cultural Studies, English, Museum Studies, Library Sciences, History, and Philosophy.
Papers can be in English or French, and should include a 250-word abstract. Submissions should be in Chicago Style, and be formatted for blind review. We will accept .docx, .doc, or .rtf only. We accept both short pieces and longer articles, not to exceed 6,000 words. We also encourage art, multi-media or opinion-based submissions. Authors are responsible for clearing all copyright.
The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2013.
Please send your submissions as an e-mail attachment to incirculation@gmail.com
Any questions or inquiries should be sent to:
Guest Editor:
Ingrid Bejerman: ingrid.bejerman@mail.mcgill.ca
Editorial Team:
Cheryl Thompson: cheryl.thompson@mail.mcgill.ca
Joseph Sannicandro: joseph.sannicandro@gmail.com
Alan Hui-Bon-Hoa: alan.hui-bon-hoa@mail.mcgill.ca
[1] Randal Beam, “Journalism Professionalism as an Organizational-Level Concept,” Journalism Monographs 121 (June 1990), p. 1.
(click to enlarge)
View Issue 2 (web)
Download (pdf)
In Circulation: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Media | Arts | Politics
Department of Art History & Communication Studies
EDITORS:
Joseph Sannicandro, Cheryl Thompson, Alan Hui-Bon Hoa
ASSISTANTS:
Mercelie Dionne-Petit, Anne Sophie Garcia, and Wendy Pringle
CREDITS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
Special thanks to the faculty and staff of the Department of Art History & Communication Studies at McGill University.
Cover Art: “UNTITLED” by COURTNEY BOOKS.
Logo: Pia Ravi
Thank you to everyone who submitted to “Archiving and Memory.” We’re very impressed by the quality and variety of submissions. We aim to have all the submissions reviewed and critiqued and responded to by mid-July. Until then.
Archiving and Memory
At precisely the moment in which print and music become immaterial, and our access to content outpaces our ability to read or listen, the impulse becomes one of archiving. We seek to control, rather than collect. The paradox of infinite storage (alongside cloud computing) is that an individual can maintain a massive archive larger than many institutions of the past, and yet we don’t have the tools to properly extract information. Curating has become an invaluable skill. The archivist is the last refuge for the humanist, one who believes in the “civilizing powers of reading the right books,” as Sloterdijk puts it in his essay, “Rules for the Human Park” (2002). What have we given up in this turn? What sorts of artistic and scholarly approaches and methodologies are being employed to deal with this new relationship to “information”?
Is the promise of information and communication merely a smoke-screen for neo-liberalism, increased technologization, or a further example of the corporatization of the university? Does the discourse of immaterial labour further mystify and obscure the exploitative social relations capitalism is based upon, particularly the very material labour that supports our technological networks and devices? The core value seems to remain communication and information; a la Nietzsche, is there a virtue in forgetting? Are there artistic responses that make use of ephemerality or singularity?
We seek submissions that question the use of and materiality of the archive and the ways in which the act of archiving has the potential to change the meaning of works of art, information, or objects. What role does the archivist play? What questions should be asked of the curator? Can we locate the historical moment where this shift toward the past or archiving has taken place? What can be said about the contemporary state of cultural memory?
Papers may include but are not limited to the following:
– the nature and meaning of the archive
– the relationship between archive, culture and social change
– gender, identity and sexuality
– technology and media
– art, art practices, curation and/or representation
– queer and feminist theory
In Circulation is an interdisciplinary journal as such, we invite proposals from scholars, artists, researchers working in but not limited to: Communication Studies, Art History, Cultural Studies, English, Museum Studies, Library Sciences, History, and Philosophy.
Papers can be in English or French, and should include a 250-word abstract. Submissions should be in Chicago Style, and be formatted for blind review. We will accept .docx, .doc, .rtf, or pdf formats only. We accept both short pieces and longer articles, not to exceed 6,000 words. We also encourage art, multi-media or opinion-based submissions. Authors are responsible for clearing all copyright.
The deadline for submissions is May 15, 2012.
Please send your submissions as an e-mail attachment to incirculation@gmail.com. Any questions or inquiries should be sent to:
Cheryl Thompson (cheryl.thompson@mail.mcgill.ca)
Joseph Sannicandro (thenewobjective@gmail.com)
Alan Hui-Bon-Hoa (alan.hui-bon-hoa@mail.mcgill.ca)
________
APPEL AUX SOUMISSIONS
Les archives et la mémoire
Au moment précis où le mot imprimé et la musique deviennent des notions immatérielles, et notre accès au contenu dépasse largement notre habilité à lire et à écouter, nous sommes assaillis par une impulsion d’archiver. Nous recherchons le contrôle plutôt que le simple désir de collectionner. Le paradoxe du pouvoir infini d’entreposer (s’inscrivant au même niveau que l’informatique virtuelle ou cloud computing) reflète la possibilité qu’un individu puisse entretenir une archive plus importante encore que celles retrouvées en institutions. Malgré cela, nous n’avons toutefois pas les outils nécessaires à l’extraction proprement dite de l’information. La fonction de curateur est donc devenue indispensable. L’archiviste est, en quelque sorte, le dernier représentant de la ligné de l’humaniste, celui qui croit aux pouvoirs civilisateurs d’une lecture dite appropriée, selon Sloterdijk dans “Rules for the Human Park” (2002). Qu’avons-nous dû abandonner dans ce tournant? D’autre part, quelles sortes d’approches et de méthodologies à la fois artistiques et intellectuelles sont maintenant utilisées dans le récent traitement de l’information?
Est-ce que la promesse de la communication et du partage de l’information se définit comme un trompe-l’œil au service du néo-libéralisme, d’un recours incessant à la technologie, ou encore comme un exemple de la corporatisation de l’institution universitaire? Est-ce que le discours du labeur immatériel mystifies et obscures davantage les relations sociales qualifiées d’exploitantes sur lesquelles le capitalisme fût fondé, plus particulièrement ce même labeur matériel qui supporte gadgets et avancées technologiques? La valeur dominante demeure bien la communication et le partage de l’information. Prenant en considération Nietzsche, y a-t-il de la valeur dans l’acte d’oublier? Y a-t-il des réponses dites artistiques qui font usage de notions tel que l’éphémère et l’individualisme?
Nous recherchons donc des soumissions qui questionnent l’usage même et la nature tangible de l’archive, et de ce fait, des circonstances dans lesquelles l’action d’archiver possède le potentiel de modifier la signification d’œuvres d’art, d’information, ou d’objets. Quels rôles joue l’archiviste? Quelles sont les questions qu’un curateur doit se poser? Peut-on localiser le moment précis dans l’histoire où un retour sur le passé et un besoin d’archiver s’est fait sentir pour la première fois? Qu’en est-il de l’état de la mémoire culturelle d’aujourd’hui?
Les essais/articles doivent inclure, mais ne sont toutefois pas limités aux sujets suivants:
– La nature et la signification de l’archive
– La relation entre l’archive, la culture et les changements sociaux
– L’identité et la sexualité
– La technologie et les médias
– L’art, les pratiques artistiques, la conservation et la représentation
– Les études féministes et queer
In Circulation est une publication interdisciplinaire, nous encourageons donc des soumissions provenant d’artistes, d’étudiants et de chercheurs travaillant dans les domaines suivants : Études en communications, Histoire de l’art, Études culturelles, Anglais, Muséologie, Science de l’information et des bibliothèques, Histoire, Philosophie, etc.
Les essais peuvent être écrits en français ou en anglais et doivent inclure un résumé d’environ 250 mots. Les propositions doivent suivre le modèle de citation Chicago et de plus, être formatées afin de permettre des révisions anonymes. Nous acceptons seulement les fichiers en format .docx, .doc, .rtf et pdf. Les essais peuvent être soit courts ou longs, sans toutefois dépasser 6000 mots. Nous encourageons également les soumissions artistiques, multimédia ou encore les articles d’opinions. Chaque auteur est tenu responsable d’obtenir les droits d’auteurs appropriés.
La date limite de soumissions est le 15 mai 2012.
Veuillez s’il-vous-plaît envoyer vos soumissions en pièces jointes par courriel à l’adresse suivante: incirculation@gmail.com. Veuillez faire parvenir par courriel toutes questions ou commentaires à:
Cheryl Thompson (cheryl.thompson@mail.mcgill.ca)
Joseph Sannicandro (thenewobjective@gmail.com)
Alan Hui-Bon-Hoa (alan.hui-bon-hoa@mail.mcgill.ca)
Rhizome recently posted this fascinating short documentary on internet infrastructure.
Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors is a short documentary explaining internet infrastructure, focusing on the art deco building 60 Hudson Street in Tribeca, which is now one of the most concentrated carrier hotels in the world. The internet has an “ironically very limited geography in terms of big strategic concentrations,” explains Stephen Graham, professor of cities and society, Newcastle University, in the short film. “The big affluent high tech information rich regions” is where the infrastructure is densely located. And 60 Hudson Street was especially ideal as a hub, given that the building was already designed to accommodate cables as it was first fitted for pneumatics tubes, then telegraph cables and telephone lines.
The documentary does a fine job explaining the materiality of the internet, and the city as a site of circulation. Communications infrastructures have often supported empires throughout history, and the concentration of the internet is no different. The material structure of the internet follows earlier infrastructure just as telegraph and telephone lines followed the railways. This calls to mind Harold Innis’ classic study The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (1930), in which he re-narrates the history of Canada as being crucially influenced by the beaver pelt trade, its transportation lines, and indeed its borders, being influenced by the network of the fur trade. I wonder if we can push the similarities further. Innis’ narrative emphasizes the necessary contributions of the First Nations peoples in the fur trade, dependent as it was on their ability to hunt, make use of knowledge of the land, and use tool such as snow-shoes. Of course the new technologies and social structures of the European settlers (and the violence of colonization in general) proved to destabilize their society. Whose labour is being exploited to run the material infrastructure of the internet?
Wu Ming, an Italian collective of collaborative novelists which grew out of the Luther Blisset project, recently published a blog post dealing with some of these issues. “Fetishism of Digital Commodities and Hidden Exploitation: the Cases of Amazon and Apple” focuses on Amazon’s shipping warehouses, Apple’s factories in China, e-waste, and a refreshing reading of Marx.
Judging by online comments, many people were taken by surprise, finding out for the first time that Amazon is a mega-corporation and Jeff Bezos is a boss who – as bosses customarily do – seeks profits at the expenses of any consideration for dignity, justice, and safety.
As should have been suspected, Amazon’s “miracle” (super-discounts, ultra-quick shipping, “Long Tail”, a seemingly infinite catalogue) is based on the exploitation of workforce under vexatious, dangerous, humiliating conditions. Just like the Walmart “miracle”, Sergio Marchionne’s FIAT “miracle” or any other corporate “miracle” the media have dished up to us in recent years.
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