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Call for Posters: “Digital Humanities on Site: Engaged Networks, Technologies, and Aesthetics”

We are inviting original poster proposals for the conference, “Digital Humanities on Site: Engaged Networks, Technologies, and Aesthetics,” scheduled for March 14-15, 2018 in Ouidah, Benin. We especially welcome poster presentations that will address any of the conference sub-themes, deal with areas of Digital Humanities, Digital Humanism, and Digital Literature that fit the scope of the conference, or help to advance and promote research on these fields. Abstracts may be submitted as individual posters or group projects. Posters will be exhibited during poster sessions as part of the conference. Proposals should include the title of the poster presentation, an abstract (200 words maximum) and a short biographical profile of the author.

Deadline for poster proposals: December 10th. Submissions must be sent by email to conference@dhonsite.ovh

Notification of acceptance: January 14th

Further details on submission:
The poster sessions are intended to offer researchers the chance to present their work in visual format and provide good opportunities for interaction and discussion. Presenters must therefore be prepared to engage in discussions with fellow scholars at the poster sessions.

To allow for discussion and interaction, we encourage each researcher presenting a poster to prioritize the visual benefits of the poster and to downsize the written presentation. Presenters should use colours that are easy to read and ensure that there is high contrast between text and background to enhance visibility.

Posters should not exceed the following dimensions: 120cm wide x 160cm tall 9approx. 47 x 63 inches). Posters will be placed on a standard 120 x 160 cm poster board.

Presenters must take responsibility for bringing their posters to the designated venue and hanging them up in good time before the poster sessions begin, and for removing them once the sessions are over.

Registration: The registration fees are $200. They cover the accommodation at Ouidah (3 nights: March 13-14-15), the meals (2 days) and the ground transportation from the  Airport/Hotel and to an event in Ouidah/Cotonou for the festival night on March 14.
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Call for Papers: “Queerness & Video Games” special issue of Game Studies

CALL FOR PAPERS, Game Studies journal, deadline December 31, 2017
Special issue: “Queerness and Video Games: New Perspectives on LGBTQ Issues, Sexuality, Games, and Play”
Guest editors: Bonnie Ruberg and Amanda Phillips

The intersection of LGBT issues, queerness, and video games represents a space of great turmoil and great potential. Video games, the games industry, and games culture have long struggled with discrimination and marginalization. In recent years, large-scale online harassment campaigns have made it especially difficult for those who do not fit the image of the traditional “gamer” to express their ideas through games. Yet LGBTQ game-makers — along with women, people of color, and many others — are establishing their place in the medium. At the same time, video games offer more than the opportunity to represent LGBTQ people. Games also share a common ethos with queerness, which is a way of approaching the world as well as a name for LGBTQ identities, as queer studies has long argued. Both games and queerness push us to live life otherwise, to explore alternative ways of being, and to challenge the status quo by creating opportunities for play.

This is a moment of explosive growth for queer video games and the exploration of LGBTQ issues in games. The academic paradigm of queer game studies, which brings together the established fields of queer studies and game studies, represents a fast-emerging area of scholarly growth. At the same time, over the last five years, a veritable wave of video games developed by LGBTQ game designers making work that explicitly explores queer experiences has pushed the medium in important new directions. While volumes like Queer GameStudies, Gaming Representation, and Rated M for Mature and monographs like Gaming at the Edge are establishing a body of scholarship, events like the Queerness and Games Conference and the GaymerX convention are building community around LGBTQ issues andvideo games. Additional voices from a wide variety of disciplines are joining the dialogue regularly. At this moment of national and international political upheaval, there has never been a more important time to approach video games, the defining medium of the 21st century, through queerness, queer analysis, and queer politics.

This special issue of Game Studies seeks to explore new critical perspectives on queerness and video games, building from existing queer game studies work and broadening the current scope of the paradigm by inviting intersectional voices, highlighting underrepresented LGBTQ identities, and challenging those who study video games to make explicit the political implications of their work. The interplays, overlaps, and points of tension between video games and queerness are vast and myriad. Here, we aim to push into new corners of this work, moving beyond the simple and often instrumentalized call to increase LGBTQ representation. Instead, we challenge our fellow queer game studies scholars, as well as those who are new to this area, to explore what it means to critique, play, build, protest, and feel in ways that are queer.

Possible topics for contributions include:

Intersectional perspectives on LGBTQ issues and queerness in video games. For instance, how can games and play be understood through queer of color theory? What is the relationship between disability studies and queerness in video games? How do socioeconomics, nationality, religion, etc. in games intersect with queer issues?

LGBTQ identities and experiences currently underrepresented in queer game studies scholarship, such as topics related to asexuality, bisexuality, transgender and genderqueer subjects, as well as non-normative desires (e.g. kink) and relationship styles (e.g. polyamory).

Queerness in video games beyond representation. What might it mean to play games queerly, to design games queerly, to interpret games queerly? What is the value of moving conversations around queerness in video games beyond the push for increased representation of LGBTQ characters and romances? How can we use queerness as a way to understand the technical elements of video games that are themselves underrepresented in existing scholarship, such as engines, code, and interfaces.

Queer politics and social justice in/through video games and games culture. What are queer games, game-makers, game scholars, and players working toward in the present political climate? What are the powers and the pitfalls of creating and studying queervideo games today, amidst social upheaval and reactionary vitriol in North America, Europe, and beyond?

The role of affect in queer experiences of video games. Can a game make a player feel queerly? What is the place of empathy in games that address LGBTQ perspectives and is empathy in queer games promising or problematic? What role does emotional labor play in queer games and/or the production of games more broadly, and what implications does that have for LGBTQ subjects?

Interactions between industry, mainstream reception, and video games that engage with LGBTQ issues. What responsibility do queer game-makers or queer game studies scholars have to making video games “better.” How can we reconcile critiques of “queer-baiting” with the desire for diverse representations?

The special issue editors welcome submissions from scholars from a variety of backgrounds, including those from game studies, queer studies, science and technology studies, cultural studies, and beyond. We hope to hear from authors who are new to the work of queergame studies, as well as those who have already contributed scholarship in this area.

To submit, please send full articles of 6500 – 8,000 words in length to submit@gamestudies.org(link sends e-mail) by December 31, 2017. Please follow the Game Studies Style Guide and submission instructions to be found on the Game Studies website, with this exception: for organizing your references in-text and your list of “References” follow APA. Please also make a separate “Ludography” for games referenced. Place it after References. Use only endnotes, not footnotes — see the Game Studies style guide for how to format these and for the mandatory checklist, which you need to include with your submission.

All submissions will undergo peer review. Publication of the issue is expected in Fall 2018. Please feel free to contact the Guest Editors, Bonnie Ruberg and Amanda Phillips (article content), or Game Studies Managing Editor Jessica Enevold (all other journal questions) with inquiries.

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CFP: The Digital Dissertation: History, Theory, Practice

Call for Participation

The Digital Dissertation: History, Theory, Practice

A Database and eBook Project
Virginia Kuhn, Kathie Gossett (eds.)
Abstract submission: 12 January 2018

Humanities scholars recognize the growing importance of digital media in knowledge production and distribution. However, recognition does not imply acceptance. How does one negotiate digital scholarship in an academy that remains largely print based in its outputs? The most valued scholarship is still the book, monograph, or journal article, and this not only limits the audience for humanities research to university scholars, but also limits its forms of argumentation to a primarily Western, linearly structured way of thinking. That is, relying on one mode of communication limits what can be said and to whom it can be said, making the humanities insular rather than allowing it to take advantage of opportunities to communicate with the broader public. In their study, The Responsive PhD, The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, argues that “scholarship is the heart of the doctorate” and that programs need to ask “What encourages adventurous scholarship? What retards and discourages it?” Adventurous scholarship requires “new paradigms,” which demand an examination of the often unarticulated philosophies that govern what qualifies as legitimate scholarship.

How do these “new paradigms” play out in the context of the dissertation?  While digital dissertations have been around for twenty years or more, the precise processes by which they are defined, created and defended remain something of a mystery. Is an interactive pdf significantly different than its paper-based counterpart? What specific possibilities can a digitally networked environment offer that are impossible without its affordances? How are dissertation committees able to gauge the quality of natively digital work? What support systems and processes do students need to complete these types of projects? How do precedents prove helpful in defending one’s choice to create a digital dissertation? How do digital projects change the ways faculty members advise dissertations?

This project, The Digital Dissertation: History, Theory, Practice, will consist of a definitive database of digital dissertation projects as well as an ebook whose chapters explore the larger implications of digital scholarship across institutional, geographic and disciplinary divides. Have you completed or advised a digital dissertation? Then please consider this project.

There are two ways to participate:

  1. Complete this brief survey about the work (which will form a database) by January 12, 2018.
  2. Complete this brief survey about the work (which will form a database for others) and submit a 300–500 word proposal by January 12, 2018 for a chapter in the e-book which responds to the most salient issue/s surrounding the digital dissertation and the ways that students and committee members managed the possibilities and obstacles inherent in this type of work. We imagine these chapters as being 3000 to 5000 words in length and due on May 11, 2018. Authors will be notified in early February.

Please send proposals and/or any  questions about the project to  Kathie Gossett (kegossett@ucdavis.edu(link sends e-mail)) and Virginia Kuhn (vkuhn@cinema.usc.edu(link sends e-mail)).

Link to the CFP website
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Global Digital Humanities Symposium at Michigan State University

Thursday, March 22, 2018 (All day) to Friday, March 23, 2018 (All day)

Digital Humanities at Michigan State University is proud to extend its symposium series on Global DH into its third year. Digital humanities scholarship continues to be driven by work at the intersections of a range of distinct disciplines and an ethical commitment to preserve and broaden access to cultural materials. The most engaged global DH scholarship, that which MSU champions, values digital tools that enhance the capacity of scholarly critique to reflect a broad range of literary, historical, new media, and cultural positions, and diverse ways of valuing cultural production and knowledge work. Particularly valuable are strategies in which the digital form manifests a critical perspective on the digital content and the position of the researcher to their material.

With the growth of the digital humanities, particularly in under-resourced and underrepresented areas, a number of complex issues surface, including, among others, questions of ownership, cultural theft, virtual exploitation, digital rights, endangered data, and the digital divide. We view the 2018 symposium as an opportunity to broaden the conversation about these issues. Scholarship that works across borders with foci on transnational partnerships and globally accessible data is especially welcome.

Michigan State University has been intentionally global for more than 60 years, with over 1,400 faculty involved in international research, teaching, and service. For the past 20 years, MSU has developed a strong research area in culturally engaged, global digital humanities. Matrix, a digital humanities and social science center at MSU, has done dozens of digital projects in West and Southern Africa that have focused on ethical and reciprocal relationships and capacity building. WIDE has set best practices for doing community engaged, international, archival work with the Samaritan Collections, Archive 2.0. Today many scholars in the humanities at MSU are engaged in digital projects relating to global, indigenous, and/or underrepresented groups and topics.

This symposium, which will include a mixture of presentation types, welcomes 300-word proposals related to any of these issues, and particularly on the following themes and topics by Friday, December 15, 11:59pm EST:

  • Critical cultural studies and analytics
  • Cultural heritage in a range of contexts
  • DH as socially engaged humanities and/or as a social movement
  • Open data, open access, and data preservation as resistance, especially in a postcolonial context
  • DH responses to crisis
  • How identity categories, and their intersections, shape digital humanities work
  • Global research dialogues and collaborations
  • Indigeneity – anywhere in the world – and the digital
  • Digital humanities, postcolonialism, and neocolonialism
  • Global digital pedagogies
  • Borders, migration, and/or diaspora and their connection to the digital
  • Digital and global languages and literatures
  • The state of global digital humanities community
  • Digital humanities, the environment, and climate change
  • Innovative and emergent technologies across institutions, languages, and economies
  • Scholarly communication and knowledge production in a global context

Presentation Formats:

  • 3-5-minute lightning talk
  • 15-minute presentation
  • 90-minute workshop
  • 90-minute panel

Proposal form
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CFP: Supply and Command: Encoding Logistics, Labor, and the Mediation of Making


Deadline: December 1, 2017
Location: New York, United States
Communication, Cultural History / Studies, Geography, Labor History / Studies, Journalism and Media Studies
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in (supply) chains.”
If the supply chain is only a metaphor, it is remarkably effective one. Since the moment that business consultant Keith Oliver proposed, in a meeting with the Dutch consumer electronics manufacturer Philips, the idea of managing the previously separate systems of production, marketing, distribution, sales, and finance “as though” they were a single entity, the “supply chain” has become the paramount means of mediating production, power, and politics in modern manufacture. But this totalizing entity was not the only conceptual structure that came to take command of supply. This conference explores the moments of movement, of transition, of mediation, as the forms and patterns of production became distributed and digitized, analyzed and automated, coming together into what sometimes seems to be the sole medium for managing the logistics of life and labor—the singular and total object of the global supply chain.
Supply and Command is a two day conference hosted by New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, April 19th-20th, 2018, featuring a keynote address from Deborah Cowen and Carolina Bank Muñoz. We invite scholars, writers, artists, and activists to submit papers organized around the logic of the supply chain from the perspective of communication and media studies, media history, and media anthropology. Potential topics might include (but are not limited to):

Media of logistical management, from historic supply chains like those for the transatlantic slave trade to contemporary ones for the production of cell phones, software, and the machinery of modern media.
Translation or adaptation of these forms from one medium to another, such as the digitization of paper systems of organization for computerized software services.
Accounts of how logistical media forms shape the labor process and daily life in the global supply chain, including issues of human rights and social justice.
Demystification and disruption of the logics of the supply chain and of supply chain management through ethnographic or artistic representations and interventions.
Representations of supply chains and logistical practice in literature, film, and television.
Software of supply chain management and coordination, historic and contemporary.
Digital supply chains and the logistical algorithms behind software and services.
Critical accounts of the technologies of worker surveillance, the securitization of global trade, and automation across the supply chain.
Stories of non-human actors and the mediation of environmental and ecological impact.
Metaphors that productively apply the ideas of the supply chain and logistical practice, such as the logistics of suffering, or the logistics of hope.
Media of alternative, insurgent, and queer logistical structures and systems.
Interested participants should submit a brief abstract no later than December 1st, 2017 at https://supplystudies.com/supply-and-command/  
Contact Email:  hock@nyu.edu

Link to CFP
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