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Call for Papers

Graduate Workshop 25-28 June 2015

Research Training Group Locating Media at the University of Siegen in cooperation with Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe), Centre for Science Studies (CSS), Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS), Media and Cultural Studies, Lancaster University.

Reality is in a restless flux.

(Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, [1907] 2011:553)

Situations figure prominently in many conceptual and methodological approaches. Ever since Thomas and Thomas’ that ‘if men [sic.] define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (1928, in Merton 1995), situations have formed a fundamental unit of analysis, ranging from studies of the performance of gender in inter- or intra-action (Garfinkel 1967, Butler 1990, Barad 2007) to investigations of the situated production of scientific facts (Latour and Woolgar 1986) and technological affordances at the intersection of plans and situated actions (Suchman 2007). Situations, on the one hand, serve to demarcate units of interconnected activities from the ongoing flow of events, while situatedness, on the other, highlights the open and transformative nature of practical activities. The concern with situations and situatedness cuts across feminist theory, science and technology studies, media and cultural studies, art, and the interdisciplinary mobilities paradigm in ways that are generating new insights and new mobile and inventive methodologies (Buscher, Urry and Witchger 2011, Lury and Wakeford 2012). Our PhD laboratory brings together young scholars and leading academics in order to explore these intersections. Especially, we seek to enhance our conceptual understandings of mobile and mediated situations, because situations always are made of (im)mobilities and give rise to complex mediations. Studies of connected presence (Licoppe 2004), of the present absences and absent presences of Mobile Lives (Elliott & Urry 2011) and Media Life (Deuze 2012), of scopic media and synthetic situations (Knorr Cetina 2009) engender the emergence of new modes of dwelling in comobility (Southern 2012) and even intersituativity (Hirschauer 2014). These, and (im)mobile situations of being cocooned in a moving vehicle (Laurier 2004, Watts 2008, Neubert & Schabacher 2013), of waiting (Bissell 2007), or of being interned in a detention centre or prison (Gill 2009, Moran, Piacentini and Pallot 2012) are all interconnected through a complex web of heterogeneous media.  Just like media themselves are becoming mobile, mobility itself can be transformed through media. The PhD Workshop centres around collectively working on the following issues and how they can be followed through from conceptual discussion to practical writing:

• How can we define mobile and mediated situations as units of analysis? Can situations be stretched indefinitely or should we better limit their scope?
• How are situations defined by actors as their boundaries are increasingly perforated by media and dislocated by mobility?
• Does the distinction between situations as more or less given and situatedness as more or less creative hold?
• How do mobile and mediated situations relate to other concepts such as distributed actions,heterogeneous cooperation or synthetic situations?
• What kind of media practices constitute and transform a given situation? How are semiotic resources being used by actors in (im)mobilities?
  

A limited number of 5 additional student places are available at a cost of £400.00 which includes accommodation, meals and travel from Lancaster to the Lake District.

We invite submission of extended abstracts (500-1000 words). Please submit this by 13th March 2015 to k.petersen@lancaster.ac.uk. Notification of acceptance is on or before 31st March. Please not that if you also wish to participate in the Lancaster Summer conference you also must submit an abstract there. It could be the same. The selection processes are separate.

#mobintersections