CFP: Digital Resistance

2017 Meeting of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts

October 19-21

Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus

Baltimore, Maryland

With participation from Project MUSE

The Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts invites papers exploring the resources and resistant potential of digital thinking, scholarship, and activism. How do various conceptions of “the digital” expand or restrict its possibilities?  How do digital media and modes of analysis operate in an era of information crisis and “alternative facts”?  What concepts of agency, materiality, ecology, democratization, and authority underpin digital thinking and public engagement? What futures for humanistic inquiry, public scholarship, and political activism do we envision emerging from our present moment?  What can digital work build up or take down?

Individual paper or panel topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Privacy, anonymity, access
• Democracy and its others
• Truth and truthiness
• Fact, relativism, nihilism
• New media, social media, protest media
• Circuits and circulation
• Computational scholarship, big data analytics
• Borders and border rhetorics
• Translation as political resistance
• Digital methodologies and pedagogies
• Resistance to the digital
• Persistence of the analog
• Public scholarship and the comparativist
• Digital publishing
• Going “meta”
• Archiving and anarchy
• Technologies of the self
• Nature, techne, ecology
• Cyborgs, cybernetics
• Occupying the digital
• The posthuman

ABSTRACT DEADLINE (Extended): June 1, 2017

Panel and paper proposals related to the conference theme are especially encouraged, but all topics are welcome. Please submit panel proposals (500 words) and individual abstracts (250 words) by June 1, 2017 to 2017scla@gmail.com .

Graduate students submitting a paper proposal may be eligible for an SCLA travel scholarship. Please indicate graduate student status in the email accompanying your abstract submission.