<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class="">Call for Papers for ‘Excavating Media: Devices, Processes, Apparatuses’, <br class="">an interdisciplinary conference addressing new approaches to media <br class="">theory and history <br class=""><br class="">The two-day conference will be held at the University of Cambridge on <br class="">June 30 - July 1, 2017. <br class=""><br class="">Details are available at: <a href="https://excavatingmedia.wordpress.com" class="">https://excavatingmedia.wordpress.com</a> <br class=""><br class="">Call for Papers <br class=""><br class="">Media often escape articulation, even as they shape articulation itself. <br class="">Today, we increasingly express ourselves through and within digital <br class="">media, yet our critical vocabulary for these devices, their processes, <br class="">and the apparatuses in which they are enmeshed, remains thin. Even as <br class="">the study of media has become an increasingly prominent feature of the <br class="">scholarly landscape in recent years, it remains a notoriously difficult <br class="">field to define. This conference will explore the methodologies with <br class="">which we might excavate past media forms and the knowledge they produce, <br class="">as well as practices with which we might usefully juxtapose new and old <br class="">media in order to reframe these technologies in the present. <br class=""><br class="">We invite proposals that consider new approaches to media theory and <br class="">history. We are interested in papers that will critically examine recent <br class="">developments in the field, or offer an analysis of specific media, <br class="">whether new or old, digital or analogue, that will suggest new ways to <br class="">think through our understanding of media and their epistemological <br class="">frameworks. A place to begin may indeed be with the term media, or <br class="">perhaps medium, itself—which is notoriously ill-defined, yet essential <br class="">to our theoretical frameworks. The programme committee welcomes <br class="">submissions in the form of 20-minute presentation papers from any <br class="">discipline. Topics which these might address include, but are not <br class="">limited to: <br class=""><br class="">Media and the construction of historical narrative <br class="">How do media transpire and expire? <br class="">How have digital media transformed our perception of older media forms? <br class="">The philosophy of technology: technics and techne <br class="">How do we distinguish between media and the intermedial? <br class="">Polemics on recent approaches, such as ‘media archaeology’ and <br class="">‘cultural techniques’ <br class="">How do media condition and produce knowledge? <br class=""><br class="">The conference will bring together individuals from a variety of <br class="">disciplines to discuss how we might enhance our articulations of media. <br class="">Focusing on media will offer a new avenue towards the consideration of <br class="">the conceptual and material frameworks that undergird the more <br class="">traditional subject matter of humanistic and social-scientific work. <br class="">Such questions might radically alter our understanding of <br class="">interdisciplinary work and the theoretical models in which we trade. An <br class="">interrogation of the epistemologies bound up with media remains <br class="">essential in questioning the binary of the old and the new, the <br class="">antiquated and the relevant, the useful and the remainder. <br class=""><br class="">Plenary addresses will be given by: <br class=""><br class="">Jussi Parikka (Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics, <br class="">Winchester School of Art) <br class=""><br class="">Bernhard Siegert (Gerd-Bucerius-Professor for History and Theory of <br class="">Cultural Techniques and Director of IKKM, Bauhaus Universität Weimar) <br class=""><br class="">Abstracts for individual papers should be no more than 300 words in <br class="">length and should be sent, along with a biographical note, to <br class=""><a href="mailto:excavatingmedia@gmail.com" class="">excavatingmedia@gmail.com</a> by Saturday, 22 April 2017. Notifications of <br class="">acceptance will be sent out by the end of April. <br class=""><br class="">Conveners: James Gabrillo (Faculty of Music) & Nathaniel Zetter (Faculty <br class="">of English) </body></html>