[STS-Africa] CFP: Media as Evidence and Object: Politics at the Intersection of Method and Analysis

[lisa poggiali]

Hello All,

A colleague and I are putting together a panel for the 2016 American
Anthropological Association Annual Meeting this Fall. Some of you may be
interested (CFP below).

Call for Papers for the 2016 American Anthropological Association Annual
Meeting in Minneapolis

*Media as Evidence and Object: Politics at the Intersection of Method and
Analysis*

*Organizers: *

*Amber Reed, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania*

*Lisa Poggiali, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania*


This panel contemplates the iterative relation between media as
methodological “evidence,” on the one hand, and analytic “object,” on the
other.  In the first register, media help anthropologists gather together
instances of discourse and traces of cultural practice, and can be
mobilized as tools for closing the gaps of space and time that make
ethnographic research challenging. In this way, media aid anthropologists
in delimiting, collecting, and analyzing their ethnographic objects. In the
second register, media serve as the ground on which social analysis takes
place: e.g. online forums, software platforms, or television programs.
Here, media are representational and material forms that shape – and are
shaped by – subjectivity and social life.

Our panel takes this dual-meaning of media as its point of departure in
order to investigate media’s impact on contemporary political life. It is
oriented around the following questions: How do different forms and uses of
media support and/or disrupt pervasive enlightenment values of rationality,
freedom, and individual liberty?  In what ways might we, as ethnographers,
signal liberal or post-liberal aspirations through our methodological
practice? What instantiations of the demos or the public are new media
technologies bringing into being?  If the production of collective
political spaces is always context-specific (as we contend they are), is
there also a shared theory of media that our comparative work can gesture
towards?  What are the ethical implications of our methodological
engagements with media when we consider that we help to  produce the public
sphere that we then attempt to study?  We welcome theoretically astute,
ethnographically rich papers that approach these issues from any geographic
context.

We are particularly interested in papers that address:

   -

   media as methodology
   -

   media as object of study
   -

   production of publics and political life
   -

   media’s intersection with enlightenment and/or post-enlightenment
   rationalities


Submission Info:

Please send an abstract and CV to both amber.reed at sas.upenn.edu and
poggiali at sas.upenn.edu by MARCH 20, 2016

-- 
Lisa Poggiali, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship and Constitutionalism
University of Pennsylvania
3440 Market Street, Suite 300
Philadelphia, PA 19104-3335
tel (Kenya): +254 727 543 880
tel (U.S.): 917-699-3302
e-mail: poggiali at s <poggiali at stanford.edu>as.upenn.edu
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