cfp.english.upenn.edu

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Call for Papers:
Mobile Media Narratives
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This collection investigates the relationship between mobile technologies and narrative forms. Extending Michele de Certeau’s notion that “Every story is a travel story — a spatial practice,” the chapters in this collection each develop ways that storytelling, oral histories, literary texts, and game stories have converged with mobile devices to reengage and interrogate the site-specificity of narrative.

While each chapter will focus on compelling examples, the primary impetus of the collection is the theoretical exploration of the nature of narrative and the consequences of its convergence with mobile devices. Thus, this collection does not dwell on the specifics of a particular device, interface, or instantiation of mobile narrative, but instead uses these as a springboard into a deeper analysis of what is happening to narrative in the era of pervasive computing. This book will therefore seek to extend beyond the rapid obsolescence of particular mobile technologies to instead focus on the ways mobile media and its future instantiations are altering our conceptions of reading, storytelling, and the dissemination of narratives. Chapter topics may include explorations of the following:

• The remediation of literary texts onto location-based technologies
• Embodiment and the phenomenology of mobile reading
• The nature of space and place in mobile narratives
• Location-based social networks and storytelling
• Oral histories and ways of remembering via mobile technologies
• Notions of public reading
• Immersion in location-based narratives
• Performance art and mobile technology
• Modes of site-specific reading: from deep attention to hyper-attention
• Archiving location-based digital narratives/Mobile narratives as archive
• The relationship between story and urban mobile games
• The relationship between the database and narrative in mobile media narratives
• Mapping and mobile storytelling
• Virtual communities developed through mobile storytelling

Please note: most of the collection is already established and underway, bringing together many of the top scholars in the fields of mobile technologies and narratology. I am looking to fill out the collection with a few more chapters, thus broadening the range of perspectives, methodologies, and examples. The proposal is initially being pitched, by request, to the University of Minnesota Press.

The timeline for your contribution to the book will be as follows:

• 500 word abstracts due to me by November 1, 2010. Please also include a short bio.
• If accepted, full chapters are due by February 1, 2011.

Please send all correspondence to: jfarman_at_umd.edu