CALL FOR PAPERS

Keep it Dirty: an affiliative network oriented towards ecological consciousness-raising and collective-image production, facilitated in the interest of a new posthuman environmental solidarity

Content considered and published on a rolling basis.

Editors: Samuel Ray Jacobson + Eileen Joy

We want you to imagine a world with the courage to see gathering dust not as a nuisance but as the medium of a solidarity with the earth we all share. This is world where things don't just get messy, they get more interesting. A world where we join in the sacred sublime of nature's everlasting grit, our things and places becoming dirtily entwined with the land. The joy is deliciously variegated, eminently palpable, and it is SHARED.

KEEP IT DIRTY is an instruction and a movement. In response to the ongoing California Drought, KEEP IT DIRTY is asking everyone to stop washing their cars. Every carwash avoided saves up to 100 gallons of precious potable water, depending on the method not-taken – that's enough water to keep the average person adequately hydrated for three months. Or to take twenty-five showers. Or for sixty-two toilet flushes. (Go ahead, try not using the toilet for two weeks!)

Thankfully here in the land of fruits and nuts we're vain enough to love something that says you could be doing good just by not doing something you'd probably rather avoid anyway – we want to use that laziness to help the earth. But more than that, what KEEP IT DIRTY stands for is a wringing out of the purposive guilt from the cause of the environment, while calling for a full-hearted embrace of everything we do bad, for good.

We like entropy, we like narcissism, and we like decadence. We want inaction, in action. We feel that to KEEP IT DIRTY is the best thing anyone can do because it's easy and it communicates and it's totally yours even though you're not doing anything. It's a real metaphor. It says: you know what I mean. It says: we all live here, asshole – act like it.

As an active and reparative reconsideration of our given interaction with the earth, environment, and belongings, KEEP IT DIRTY strives to incite and actively represent the interest of sustainable collaboration: with one another, and with the planet. THIS WHERE YOU COME IN.

Broadly speaking, KEEP IT DIRTY vociferously rejects the moralizing, egocentric, and falsely prophetic ambitions of our Occupied, slactivist present to curate a consciousness of the long duration of now. Our wrist-watches turn in geologic time as we affirmatively reconsider the anarchic delight of screaming out "hell no!" We say "us" to you. We say, "you understand." We say that know you want what we want so, CONTRIBUTE SOMETHING.

Make content. Get people involved. Take this and make it yours.
Send us something ASAP and we will put it online at KEEPITDIRTY.ORG. It can be original, it can be found. It can be short or long. It can be words, it can be pictures, it can be filmed. All forms of content are welcome. Larger-scale, non-traditional, or longer-term proposals will also be enthusiastically considered.

Potential topics may include,
• Ecologically-motivated subjectivities before, during, and after the 21st century
• Cultures of cleanliness
• Freudian/Lacanian studies of grooming, sociality, and sexuality
• Environmental science and/or ecology and technology studies
• Tropes of "dirtiness" in, or employed in the interest of, identity politics and ideological critique
• Posthuman politics and subjectivities of "affinity"
• Multiple or fractured readings of ideas of "dirt"
• Technologies and practices of geologic time
• The practical economies of sustainability and related political agendas
• Critical studies of the body/embodiment at an ecological scale
• Environmentalist histories/historiographies of media, technology or consumption
• Biotechnologies and Environmental Intelligence
• Environmentalism and accelerationist politics
• Environmentalism and new materialisms
• Queer Ecologies

In addition to this selection we also welcome just about anything else that talks about media, technology, culture, and our implications within and by "natural" environments, within an ecological framework. Abstracts do not have to be accompanied by a CV or biological note, and can exceed 350 words; they are also unnecessary. Just send us your stuff, we know how to read. You can send it either to samuelrayjacobson@gmail.com or eileenajoy@gmail.com.

We recommend that prospective content creators submit before June 1 as our framework is actively evolving. Please refer to the website KEEPITDIRTY.ORG for the latest guidelines after that time.

Submissions can be from early career researchers, established scholars, graduate students pursuing their Masters, PhD, or international equivalent, subject experts, or professional practitioners.

All eligible submissions will be considered, those less eligible will be considered more highly. Earlier submission is highly encouraged, as we really kind of need stuff like… ASAP. But later is good too. Keep it coming!

About KEEP IT DIRTY:
KEEP IT DIRTY is an affiliative network oriented towards ecological consciousness-raising and collective-image production, facilitated in the interest of a new posthuman environmental solidarity. Founded in October 2014 in response to the ongoing California Drought, KEEP IT DIRTY is published without incentive or affirmation by Eileen Joy and Samuel Ray Jacobson. KEEP IT DIRTY is neither refereed nor edited by established or emerging scholars working across diverse fields of visual, literary, media, and communication studies, or those the fine arts, architecture and design – but these are the people that make up the bulk of our contributors and readers.
KEEP IT DIRTY is affiliated with punctum books.

For more information visit:
http://www.keepitdirty.org/manifesto-of-keep-it-dirty