To whom it may concern,

We would appreciate your help circulating the following Call For Papers to
your graduate students. The graduate conference, organized by the Media
Fields Collective at UCSB will be held April 2-3, 2015. Abstracts are due
by January 9, 2015.

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UCSB MEDIA FIELDS CONFERENCE 2015

ENCOUNTERS

April 2-3, 2015

The Media Fields Collective at UC Santa Barbara is excited to announce its
fifth biennial conference exploring the intersections of media and space.
We propose “encounters” as a framework through which these intricate
relationships may be addressed. This term has been strategically deployed
to think about exchanges, contact zones, and interactions among agents,
institutions, and technologies in various positions of power. Our goal is
to re-examine the ways in which the encounter has been deployed and to
explore its potential as a critical framework that may be applied to
emerging trends across media studies. We invite participants to consider
encounter’s potential for creating mutualities among parties and explore
the ways particular encounters reflect, overturn, cloud or reverse this
potential. How do we grapple with the slippage between the ideal
possibilities of an encounter and its uneven actualities? What are
theoretical, aesthetic, political and practical fields where we may locate
such slippages and what is at stake? How can we think of casual encounters
at media interfaces, platforms and screens? How do ways of conceiving
proximity, isolation, autonomy, and agency shape notions of an encounter?

We encourage submissions that enable us to think of encounters as layered
processes that may imply varying degrees of friction and fluidity,
productivity and enclosure. Essays could use the idea of the encounter to
trouble borders, physical and non-physical, by identifying seepage, flow,
explosion, blockage, creativities across layers in ways that challenge
linear understandings of power and agency. Problematizing seemingly stable
and self-evident dichotomies like the global/ local, public/private,
licit/illicit, and thinking about how they fold into each other may provide
an initial framework for envisioning encounters. We are particularly
interested in multidimensional viewpoints that bring together the fecund
exchanges and pernicious outcomes of these meetings.

The following themes might serve as catalysts for these conversations:

- Interdisciplinary encounters involving film and media.

- How can we understand media texts as encounters.

- Who controls the spaces where these generative encounters may take place.

- Interactions involving governance and global/local media practices.

-  How may we conceive of “placeless” encounters and how they allow us to
rethink space.

- New types of encounters facilitated by social media and how these
encounters shape our identity.

- Interpenetrations between media and socio-cultural discourses of
difference.

- What kinds of meetings are produced through media industrial practices.

- The interplay between piracy and intellectual property rights.

- How might hapticity, interface, and software be understood as matters of
interactive and technological encounters?.

- What kinds of encounters are produced through surveillance or
clandestinely?

Each panelist will have 15-20 minutes to present his/her paper. Please
email a 300-350 word proposal and a brief bio of the author (in Word
format) to [log in to unmask] by January 9, 2015.

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