Call for Papers: (Dis)empowering technologies. Special, opening edition of "TransMissions: Journal of Film and Media Studies"

full name / name of organization: 
Institute of the Audiovisual Arts, Jagiellonian University

Call for Papers: (Dis)empowering technologies. Special, opening edition of "TransMissions: Journal of Film and Media Studies"
Edited by Magdalena Zdrodowska (Jagiellonian University, Poland)

Throughout the history technologies have been regarded with ambivalence as both liberating and oppressive for communities as well as individuals. The deaf education in the United States serves as a perfect example of this ambiguity as it was grounded in the Enlightenment idea of rational social order in which each social group has its own place and all citizens should be socially useful, the educational system was a tool of ordering the society by removing the non-normative groups such as the blind, the deaf, orphans and mentally impaired from the social domain and placing them in specially formed institutions. Schools for the deaf and the blind were in fact not educational institutions but charities where children were normalized: taught how to fit in the hearing and seeing society. The idea behind this scheme was to make the society more efficient by solving social problems such as criminality and unemployment. These institutions had the total control over pupils' bodies and constructed their future lives by a set of professions that were taught there. In the process of "cleansing" the society the dispersed deaf were gathered in an exceptionally propitious milieu where the unified sign language and later the Deaf Culture emerged. In fact the technology that was supposed to integrate the deaf into the mainstream society enabled creating a distinctive Deaf community and identity – the community of the others. The most vivid consequences of the governmentality took place in the United States (the heir of French educational system) where very strong and dynamic communities arose around schools for the deaf. They gave the occasion to meet future partners, fiends, make life-along bonds. It is where the myth of the Deaf World emerged.

The rise of electronic media showed a great deal of emancipatory potential of information and communication technologies (e.g. hacktivism, liberation technology, and cloud protesting). It made the self-representation and activist movements much easier for both communities and individuals whose possibilities of action are limited due to their minority status, disability, social or political situation (as showed by Mary L. Gray in Out in the Country. Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America, 2009 or Stefania Milan in Social Movements and Their Technologies: Wiring Social Change, 2013). On the other hand, the same technologies that enable entering public sphere, networking, and gaining representation may also act as barriers disabling users due to technical issues (as Katie Ellis and Michael Kent showed in Disability and New Media, 2011) and / or being an extremely easy subject of surveillance and abuse.

This ambiguity of technology, its emancipating and at the same time limiting aspects, will be the main theme of the first issue of "TransMissions: Journal of Film and Media Studies", a newly launched online academic journal published by the Institute of the Audiovisual Arts, Jagiellonian University. Therefore we have pleasure to invite everyone who is interested in contributing to the special edition on (dis)empowering technologies from the fields of media studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, media archaeology, history of technology, and film studies.

We shall be happy to receive theoretical as well as research-based papers covering analogue or electronic technologies used by collectives and individuals that might include the following topics (but not exclusively):
social movement activism
ethnic, national and religion minorities and their technologies
women and their technologies
queer and their technologies
disabled and their technologies
migrants and their technologies
methodological aspects of researching (dis)empowering technologies
prosthesis as (dis)empowering artifact
social media
mobile media
community radio

200-300 word abstracts are expected to be sent to magda.zdrodowska@uj.edu.pl

The special issue is due to be published in Summer 2016.

Publication schedule:
Submission of abstracts: January 31, 2016
Notification of abstract acceptance: February 29, 2016
Submission of full papers: April 17, 2016
Notification of papers acceptance: May, 2016
Publication date: June, 2016