[artinfo] PLACE - Location and Belonging in New Media Contexts

[Geert Lovink [c]]

>Call for contributions - please circulate - apologies if you receive this 
>more than once.
>
>PLACE
>Location and Belonging in New Media Contexts.
>
>Edited by Danny Butt, Jon Bywater and Nova Paul
>
>James Clifford notes that "land" (whenua, ples, country, la tribu, etc.) 
>signifies the past in the future, a continuous, changing base of political 
>and cultural operations - while a political theory "which sees everything 
>as potentially realigned, cut, and mixed, has difficulty with this 
>material nexus of community". Indigenous epistemologies have sophisticated 
>structures for negotiating belonging among communities who may become 
>widely dispersed from their homelands. New media, by contrast, 
>demonstrates biases toward the the dislocated: a cosmopolitanism 
>implicitly located in the urban, where communities form and fragment in 
>"virtual" environments.
>
>However, questions of belonging and identification remain for those who 
>use new media networks. Knowledge in the new media environment may 
>circulate rapidly, but it is still located in human subjects who develop 
>knowledge and identification within physical and social locations. The aim 
>of this publication is to directly address silences within new media 
>discourse on place, as well as understand how long-held attachments to 
>place are transforming in the contemporary media context.
>
>We currently have interest from international academic publishers in a 
>book on these issues to be published in coordination with the Cultural 
>Futures: Place, Ground and Practice in Asia Pacific New Media Arts 
>symposium in Auckland, December 2005 
><http://culturalfutures.place.net.nz>. We are also interested in 
>soliciting writing from those not attending the event, including work 
>outside the regional focus of the symposium.
>
>Themes that may be addressed in the publication include:
>
>Place-based new media practices
>Migration and movement
>Indigeneity and colonisation
>Home and belonging
>New media and cultural transformation
>Globalisation and cosmopolitanism
>Local activism and social change
>
>Abstracts of 500 words, along with a 200 word bio should be sent to 
><info at culturalfutures.place.net.nz> by October 14th 2005. We expect to 
>notify authors by the end of November 2005, and require chapters to be 
>completed by the end of February 2006, with the book to be published later 
>that year. We also intend to issue a further call for images and pageworks 
>in the future.
>
>Please direct any enquiries to the editors c/- Danny Butt 
><danny at dannybutt.net>