Susan Driver (York University, Toronto) and Natalie Coulter (York
University, Toronto) are inviting submissions for a proposed anthology
exploring the intersections of youth cultures, affective relations and
digital media.
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of academic and popular
interest in the ways young people engage with digital media as a pervasive
and integral part of their everyday lives. On the one hand celebratory
approaches position youth as generational leaders with unique knowledge
and skills to operate devices and mobilize applications. Alternately young
people are positioned in passive ways as victims of corporate
technological systems that shape their identities and delimit their social
relations within narrow and normative boundaries. In both these framings
young people are homogenized and fixed within dominant institutions of the
digital political economy. Big data and overarching structures become
primary sites of study losing touch with the voices, embodiments and
practices of youth within their local contexts of learning, creativity and
socialization.
Alternatively, to hone in closely on young people has often proven to be
invasive, bound up with moral evaluations that rigidly interpret the
subjective and interpersonal lives of young people, negatively judging how
they connect, play games, make profiles, text each other, upload images
and gather information. And within this process it is striking how much
interest gets loosely placed on the emotional and affective dimensions of
young peoples? experiences. It is precisely the feelings and bodily
encounters of young people that grip moral panics about the excess and
dangers of online interactions: sharing too much information, immersing
too fast and far within virtual realities, fictionalizing the self, taking
sexual risks, becoming violent or addicted, and losing control. Yet in
framing youth experience in terms of affectively charged relations that
transgress rational and moral codes of meaning, youth are once again
constructed in universalizing and naturalizing ways. What is lacking in
this research are expansive critical, empirically detailed and ethically
nuanced modes of theorizing the links between youth, affect and digital
mediations.
Scholars have begun to grapple with the affective contours of youth
mediations using supple and complex interdisciplinary tools that recognize
the historical and ideological stakes of their practice. Nancy Lesko?s
deconstructive approach to modern normalizing conceptions of youth offers
a brilliant starting point to reconsider how youth affect gets erased,
reified and misrepresented. Feminist approaches to the study of girls?
media engagements have been especially responsive to the creative
emotional and symbolic negotiations of young people across a range of
media formats (Angela McRobbie, Michelle Fine, Anita Harris, Jessica
Ringrose, Jessalynn Keller, Anna Hickey-Moody, Emma Renolds). Critical
attention to youth sexualities have also turned toward the ways desire and
power play out in a multitude of ways, against restrictive heteronormative
expectations (Jack Halberstam, Susan Talburt, Whitney Monaghan, Kathryn
Bond Stockton, Natasha Hurley, Jen Gilbert, Mary Louise Rasmussen).
Focusing on how racial and national identities and embodiment become
articulated and resisted, scholars have elaborated research to considering
how and why race matters across media (Tricia Rose, Gwendolyn Pough, Greg
Dimitriadis, Sunaina Marr Maira, Gayatri Gopinath). These lists are in no
way exhaustive but what is striking are the ways in which thinking through
affects of joy, fear, desire, anxiety, hope, longing, anger, pleasure and
grief (among many others), become central to the process of understanding
young people?s mediated lives across a range of youth scholarship.
Recognizing the interconnected embodied, affective, psychic, social,
cultural, political worlds of young people becomes vital within research
grappling with experiences of marginalization and inequality.
These diverse and overlapping bodies of work are at the forefront of
attending to the historically mediated and situated dynamics of young
peoples affective lives and the conceptual mappings and discursive
formations that make them thinkable and politically relevant. Our book
aims to expand upon this emerging research, insisting upon theoretical
applications and speculations that are simultaneously specific and
historically grounded. Attending to the emerging networked publics and
social media landscapes that elicit young people?s intense interest, we
want to address changing intersections of technology, practice,
representation and affective experiences. We are excited to explore how
social movements including Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, Arab Spring
and Occupy have been propelled through the affectively charged and nuanced
participations that mobilize social movements by, for and about young
people. We also want to attend to the detailed ways youth use and
transform media technologies and platforms, at the level of their everyday
worlds. With the popularity of sharing user-generated content on mobile
devices through platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr,
youth are telling stories, imaging themselves and forging connections in
prolific ways that articulate relations between self and other, intimacy
and community, creativity and politics that go beyond binary ways
thinking. We value research that engages with the small data realms of
young people through which ephemeral and fluid online interrelations
become noticeable and meaningful, giving rise to new interpretive styles
and methodologies that refuse totalization and closure. Against the often
abstract tendencies of affect theory, we aim to gather research that is
attentive to the changing mediated social conditions of the affective
relations of young people across gender, sexual, racial, national and
class differences.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
Affective mediations and globalization/diasporic youth engagements
Young peoples networked sexualities
Gender affect and mediation
Affective dimensions of algorithms/digital surveillance
Affective relations of race/mobilizations of anti-racist youth expressions
and movements
Moral regulations/panics of young peoples affective relations
Affective formations of young people through platforms/apps/hardware
design
Affective life of video games
Mediated embodiments
Neoliberal ideologies and the mediation of youth affect
Commodification/commercialization of affects
Please submit a 500-word abstract that includes a short list of
references, and a brief bio, by Friday Sept. 15, 2016 to [log in to unmask]
or [log in to unmask] .
We will notify successful submissions by Oct 1. Full essays will be due
by Dec. 1.
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Natalie Coulter, PhD | Assistant Professor | Communication Studies |
York University
| 3042 TEL Building | 4700 Keele St. | Toronto ON | M3J 1P3 | Canada
| ( 416.736.2100 x 77849 | * [log in to unmask]
My new book, Tweening the Girl, can be found here:
http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?event=cmp.ccc.seitenstruktur.detailseiten&seitentyp=produkt&pk=71179&cid=335
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