Call for Application: Media@McGill Postdoctoral Fellowship

 

 

Description: Media@McGill is a hub of interdisciplinary research, scholarship and public outreach on issues in media, technology and culture, located in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. To see the list of postdoctoral fellowships, click here.

Media@McGill offers Postdoctoral Fellowships to promising scholars engaging in media-related research, as defined in Media@McGill’s mission statement.

Fellows are provided with a workspace, and are expected to take an active role in the research activities and academic life of Media@McGill (participation in conferences, seminars, etc.). They may also have the possibility of teaching a course within the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill.

Eligibility: The Media@McGill Postdoctoral Fellowship is open to both national and international scholars who completed their doctoral degrees in a university other than McGill no earlier than June 1, 2011. Candidates must have received their PhD by May 1, 2015. Fluency in English is essential; working knowledge of French is an asset.

Value and Duration: The stipend for the Media@McGill Postdoctoral Fellowship is $45,000 CAD for 12 months (this includes a travel research stipend) beginning in September 2015.

Application Process Deadlines: Media@McGill will be offering one Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2015-2016.

1. In a cover letter, applicants must stipulate how their research is related to Media@McGill’s mission statement and to Media@McGill’s 2015-16 theme: Art, Media and the Public Sphere(s).  Applicants should also identify a potential faculty supervisor who is a member of Media@McGill and whose research is closely tied to that of the applicant. Please do not contact a potential supervisor at this stage.

The following should be included in all statements of interest and be sent in a single pdf (the application will not be accepted otherwise). The documents’ order follows the list below:

  1. a cover letter;
  2. a research proposal (750 words);
  3. a Curriculum Vitae (maximum 5 pages);

Deadline: Complete statements of interest should be sent to sophie.toupin@mcgill.ca by Friday, January 30, 2015 at 5 p.m. E.S.T.

2. Statements of interest will be reviewed by the Media@McGill potential supervisor, and candidates will be notified of results shortly after. If successful, applicants will be asked to provide the following additional documents:

  1. official copies of transcripts during graduate studies;
  2. three letters of recommendation (one of which is by the potential Media@McGill faculty supervisor);
  3. a writing sample (maximum 20 pages).

Deadline: Complete applications should be sent to sophie.toupin@mcgill.ca  by Thursday, March 26, 2015 at 5 p.m. E.D.T. Applications will be reviewed by Media@McGill’s Steering Committee, and candidates will be notified of results in early May 2015.

For additional information, please contact sophie.toupin@mcgill.ca

Free Public Lecture: Tv Snapshots: An Archive of Everyday Life

Monday, February 2, 2015 2:30 pm Reception
3:00 pm Lecture Gerlinger Lounge — FREE

A public lecture by Lynn Spigel, Francis E. Willard Professor of Screen Cultures, Northwestern University will be held at the Gerlinger Lounge on February 2. In her lecture, Spigel will be exploring a collection of family snapshots depicting people posing in front of their TV sets in the 1950s and 1960s and how they used TV as a backdrop for social performances of family life and social identities of gender, class, and race:

“This talk explores my new collection of over 5000 family snapshots depicting people posing in front of their TV sets in the 1950s and 1960s. I consider how snapshot cameras functioned as an appendage  technology for television at the time when TV first came into US  homes. Snapshots were a “thing to do” with TV beyond TV’s more  obvious function as a spectator medium.

These snapshots provide visual  evidence of the social life into which TV inserted itself. They show  us how people arranged their rooms for television and how they used it  as an object of display. But, most importantly, they show us how  people used TV as a backdrop for social performances of family life  and social identifies of gender, class, and race.

In addition to  considering these photos as a new form of visual evidence for the  social practices surrounding TV’s innovation, I also explore their  status as forms of “analog nostalgia” by considering why they have  reappeared as valuable collectibles on the vintage market and online  websites today.” -Lynn Spigel

Spigel, the Francis E. Willard Professor of Screen Cultures at Northwestern University, is the author of TV By Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television; Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs; and Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. She has co-edited volumes including The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict; Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader; and Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition.

There will be a reception with Lynn Spigel at 2:30 pm, followed by the lecture at 3 pm. Coffee and desserts will be served before and after the event.

This event is co-sponsored by the School of Journalism & Communication/Media Studies Program.

 

Media, Democracy, and Technologies: Possibilities and Challenges

Friday, March 6, 10a.m.-1p.m.

Knight Library Browsing Room

Gabriela Martinez, Associate Professor, Journalism Masters Area Director

On March 6, Resident Scholar Gabríela Martínez, hosts a symposium on Media, Democracy and Technologies: Possibilities and Challenges at the School of Journalism and Communication.

Featuring Madeleine Bair, Witness; Danny O’Brien, Electronic Frontier Foundation; Endalk Chala, Zone 9 Bloggers; and Tewodros Workneh, UO School of Journalism and Communication. Introduction and moderation by Gabríela Martínez, UO School of Journalism and Communication.

Cosponsored with the UO School of Journalism and Communication.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun to lead seminar on “Slut-Shaming”

 

February 17, 2015
12:00-1:00 pm

Jane Grant Conference Room
330 Hendricks Hall
UO campus

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Wayne Morse Chair visitor during winter term, will offer a lunchtime seminar at the Center for the Study of Women in Society on February 17, 2015, at noon. She will speak on the subject of Slut-Shaming, based on her research on media habits. She comes from a feminist perspective.

Wendy Chun is professor and chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media.

She is author of  Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), and Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011); she is coeditor (with Tara McPherson and Patrick Jagoda) of a special issue of  American Literature entitled New Media and American Literature, coeditor (with Lynne Joyrich) of a special issue of Camera Obscura entitled Race and/as Technology, and coeditor (with Thomas Keenan) of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2005).

Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women in Society and the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics. The Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics is dedicated to education and public discussion of current issues in law and politics.

Interested in attending?
Please RSVP to csws@uoregon.edu or call 541-346-5015.

 

Deadline Extended: CFP UCSB Media Fields Conference

UCSB MEDIA FIELDS CONFERENCE 2015 ENCOUNTERS
April 2­‐3, 2015

Media Fields has extended this years Call For Papers for the fifth graduate conferences, Encounters. The conference, organized by the Media Fields Collective at UCSB will be held April 2‐3, 2015.

Abstracts are due by the extended deadline, January 18, 2015.

This years conference will feature keynotes from Dr. Bliss Cua Lim, professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, and Dr. Daniel Reynolds, of Emory College’s Department of Film and Media Studies.

Dr. Bliss Cua Lim is the Associate Professor, Film & Media Studies
School of Humanities at UC Irvine.  Her research interests include Philippine cinema; cinematic temporality; queer temporality; moving image archives; postcolonial and feminist film theory; transnational Asian cinemas.

 

Dr. Daniel Reynolds received his Ph.D. in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  His dissertation investigates the functions of media use in the context of the emergent systems that make it possible: platforms and apparatuses both technological and biological.

 

UCSB proposes “encounters” as a framework through which these intricate relationships may be addressed. This term has been strategically deployed to think about exchanges, contact zones, and interactions among agents, institutions, and technologies in various positions of power. The goal is to re­‐examine the ways in which the encounter has been deployed and to explore its potential as a critical framework that may be applied to emerging trends across media studies.

UCSB invites participants to consider encounter’s potential for creating mutualities among parties and explore the ways particular encounters reflect, overturn, cloud or reverse this potential. How do we grapple with the slippage between the ideal possibilities of an encounter and its uneven actualities? What are theoretical, aesthetic, political and practical fields where we may locate such slippages and what is at stake? How can we think of casual encounters at media interfaces, platforms and screens? How do ways of conceiving proximity, isolation, autonomy, and agency shape notions of an encounter?

The following themes might serve as catalysts for these conversations:

– Interdisciplinary encounters involving film and media.
-­ How can we understand media texts as encounters.
-­ Who controls the spaces where these generative encounters may take place.
-­ Interactions involving governance and global/local media practices.
-­ How may we conceive of “placeless” encounters and how they allow us to rethink space.
-­ New types of encounters facilitated by social media and how these encounters shape our identity.
-­ Interpenetrations between media and socio-­‐cultural discourses of difference.
-­ What kinds of meetings are produced through media industrial practices.
-­ The interplay between piracy and intellectual property rights.
-­ How might hapticity, interface, and software be understood as matters of interactive and technological encounters?.
-­ What kinds of encounters are produced through surveillance or clandestinely?

Each panelist will have 15‐20 minutes to present his/her paper. Please email a 300‐350 word proposal and a brief bio of the author (in Word format) to conference@mediafieldsjournal.org by January 18, 2015.​​

Public Talk: Numbers! -­ Nina Wakeford -­ Monday 12 Jan -­ 4 PM, Portland, OR

Sensing and participating in numbers: creative outcomes (for designers!) of the new numeracy project
Nina Wakeford, Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London

Monday 12 January, 4 PM
The Bison Building, 421 NE 10th, Portland 97232 With special thanks to MFA Applied Craft + Design

Dr. Wakeford will explore a research project, funded by Intel, which sought to look at numbers not in terms of the learning of math (and associated discourse of talent and phobias) but rather in terms of knowing, sensing and participating. She’ll offer examples of the types of fieldwork which were undertaken and explain how we tried to make these encounters into creative outcomes for technologists and designers. The talk will finish by suggesting an alternative set of terms with which we could discuss numbers­‐ and perhaps other forms of data‐ which move us away from the language of metrics and measurement.

Nina Wakeford is Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her publications include studies of feminist and queer internet communities, internet cafes and mobile devices as well as the use of powerpoint and theories of atmosphere. She has also produced installations and interventions in academic conferences using film and performance. Alongside Celia Lury she edited “Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social” (Routledge, 2012). She is interested in how to enact demands through material engagements, the way in which identification/disidentification is forged, modes of empathy and inhabitation, and the risks of staying loyal/respectful to the kinds of materials that initiate the work. She often supplements a vocabulary of the handmade object with time­‐based media or live performative elements.

 

CFP: Different Games, Deadline Feb 1.

Different Games, the first conference on inclusivity and diversity in games, invites participants for its 2015 edition at NYU’s Polytechnic School of Engineering, located in Brooklyn, NY, on Friday April 3 and Saturday April 4.

After a hugely successful 2nd year that welcomed 40‐​some speakers, dozens of original games and more than 300 attendees, Different Games is back for a third edition!

Critical voices from across the games community— including designers, activists, researchers, journalists and others— are invited to present new and recent work as part of our two day program.

Submissions are invited before Feb 1, 2015 in three categories (though other ideas are welcome):

1) Arcade: Designers interested in showcasing their game in the Different Games arcade should submit a brief overview of their game (no more than 500 words) that includes their design vision and concept of the game. In addition, please submit the cover art and two screenshots of gameplay. NYU welcomes pieces that will be in (beta) or play​testing phase as well as those further along in the development process.

2) Paper Presentations and Talks: NYU invites academics and creative minds alike to share recent work (written or otherwise) as speakers on our conference panels. Participants from every field are encouraged to submit writing or talks exploring topics pertaining to diversity and inclusion.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to: post mortems, design methodology, reflections on playtesting, analysis/commentary on games content (theme, gender, sexuality, etc.), game reception, and game culture/communities.

3) Breakout or Workshop Sessions: NYU invites topic​specific or exploratory discussions on challenges and solutions for promoting diversity and inclusion in the broader game community/communities and other pertinent subjects. Hands​‐on workshop sessions geared towards learning design and development skills are also invited. Your proposal should include an explanation of any equipment participants will need for your workshop. If your session will be facilitated collaboratively, please include bios and links for all co​‐facilitators.

For more information, visit the Different Games website.

To submit a proposal

Any questions can be directed to differentgamesconference@gmail.com

Lecture: The Revolt of Cities: How immigrants and young people are transforming urban politics

Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 7 p.m.
110 Knight Law Center

 

Featuring Harold Meyerson, editor-at-large of The American Prospect and weekly columnist forThe Washington Post. A frequent guest on radio and television talk shows, in 2009, he was named one of “the most influential commentators in the nation” by The Atlantic Monthly.

 

 

He is the author of Who Put The Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?, a biography of Broadway lyricist Yip Harburg. He serves as a vice chair of National Political Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Part of the Public Affairs Speaker Series presented by the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics and cosponsored by the UO Department of Political Science. Free and open to the public.

 

 

Ada/Fembot Peer Review Session

Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Digital Scholarship Center (Knight 142)
6pm

On Wednesday, January 21st, Ada (A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology) in association with Fembot, will be hosting a peer review session at the Digital Scholarship Center for Ada, Issue 7: Open Call, edited by Carol Stabile (@castabile) and Radhika Gajjala (@cyberdivalivesl)!

Ada is a feminist multimodal journal dedicated to issues of gender in new media and technology. You can check out previous issues of Ada over on the Fembot website, here.

All students are welcome, and pizza will be provided!
Please contact Carol Stabile with any questions regarding the event, or about Ada in general!
For more information about, Ada, Fembot, and the submission guidelines and/or review process for the upcoming Ada issue check out the following links:

Fembot

Ada

Submission Guidelines

Review Process