CFP:Central Pennsylvania Consortium's Africana Studies Conference: #Envisioning Black Digital Spaces

Keynote speaker: Alicia Garza, Social Activist & Co-Creator of the viral Twitter Hashtag And Movement, #BlackLivesMatter

This year's conference will take place April 8-9, 2016 on the campus of Dickinson College, Carlisle PA.

Digital networks have increasingly become primary sites for the transmission of news, history, intellectual and academic thoughts, as well as individual and communal sentiments. Contemporary activists, for instance, are using social media such as Twitter, Facebook and a number of other platforms not only as a mechanism to publicize activism, but as activism. Through these actions and expressions, people connected through membership in digital forums are engaged in an alternative mode of community building that transcends face to face encounters and engagements, all the while crossing and traversing multiple and varied communities of connected social actors. This conference therefore focuses on the ways in which people of African descent are currently claiming digital spaces to articulate their social, political, and intellectual subjectivities.
We invite scholars, artists, and activists to submit abstracts of no greater than 250 words for papers, digital projects and multi-media presentations that provide a range of interpretations of the ways in which social media, digital platforms/technologies, and the creative arts (digital music, sound projects or performance) are critical spaces that (re)envision the political lives and racial representations of Black people.. Please include the following details: title of paper or project, presenter's name and title, name of institution or office, email address, and telephone number. Deadline for submissions is December 4, 2015. Presenters will be notified of acceptance by December 31, 2015. Abstracts can be emailed to Lynn Johnson, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Dickinson College, at africanastudies@dickinson.edu.

Presenters are invited to address any aspect of the following topics:
*Digital forums and social networks as Black intellectual communities
*Social Justice/Activism in the age of digital technologies
*The political economy and social media
*Arts and the visual archive/digital archive/digital technologies
*The performativity of self-presentation in cyber-space
*The digital Africana Studies classroom