What does it mean to be with/in the digital? Who (and what) participates with/in the digital? What practices, subjectivities, and materialities emerge through participating with/in the digital? What are the modes of participation with/in the digital? What exclusions/inclusions are enacted with/in the digital? How does power flow with/in the digital? What kinds of research do we do with/in the digital?

Things are done WITH, and IN the digital. It is a vector that passes through and constitutes myriad spaces, practices, agencies, and materialities, that - while generating spaces for participation for previously excluded voices - has also brought about  our time of surveillance capitalism, labour precarity, and fatally compromised privacy. We cannot separate the digital from the social, technological, and platform infrastructures that it exists with/in, which enable and disable specific types of engagement and where new configurations of power emerge. The question, then, is one of mutually co-constitutive intervention: how are things, human and non-human, shaped with/in the digital, and how is the digital shaped with/in these encounters? Ultimately, in a time characterised as a “New Dark Age” (Bridle, 2018) because of the digital - how can critical engagement, participation, and action with/in the digital create shining vectors towards liberation? 
 
The With/in Digital conference is organised by postgraduate students from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) and aims to provide a space to explore different notions of participation and being with/in the digital. We invite contributions from postgraduates or scholars who engage the themes outlined above from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, such as media studies, aesthetics, art, cultural studies, design, political science, computer science, machine learning, big data, business studies, sociology, or anthropology. We are especially interested in works that take an interdisciplinary approach.

About CIM
The Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) was established at Warwick in 2012 to foster innovative and experimental forms of knowledge production through a sustained focus on methodology. CIM is dedicated to expanding the role of interdisciplinary methods through new lines of inquiry that cut across disciplinary boundaries, both intellectually and institutionally.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim 

Submission Guidelines

Submission deadline: 19 May
 
Participation is open to CIM, Warwick and external postgraduate students and scholars. 

We will accept the following types of contribution:
Papers (up to 15 min presentations)
Panels (3-4 papers presented together with a unifying theme, up to 1 hrs panels)
Projects, such as websites, machine learning, visualisations, or other digital artifacts addressing the themes of the conference, to be displayed and/or presented with a paper 

Please submit your abstract/proposal (max 300 words) via EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cimpg2019 explaining the type of contribution you want to present and how it fits with the themes of the conference. If there are any technical or special arrangements required for your presentation, please specify in your proposal. 

The conference organising committee will review all contributions to evaluate their fit with the themes and create a programme considering the space and time limitations  
 
Selected proposals will be notified no later than 10 May.

List of Topics

Some questions that may be addressed can include, but are not limited to:

• What does it mean to be with/in the digital? What are the implications of control, affect, interfaces, mobile devices, digital footprints, big data, quantification, surveillance and counterveillance on those with/in the digital?
• How does participation happen with/in digital? Here we might consider the inter (or intra) actions, affects and effects of media, networks, mainstream news, ‘fake news,’ alt-right, feminism, the manosphere, and activism more broadly.
• Who is with/in digital? What is the role of the human, the non-human, machine learning, algorithmic imaginaries, intersectionality, and what is the interplay (or relevance) of the subjects/consumers/producers therein?
• Why participate with/in digital? Here we might think about research, activism, relationships, and consumption with/in the digital, but also engage with questions on “communicative capitalism,” political (dis)engagement, threats against activists, “doxing,” and so-called “revenge porn.”
• How does power operate with/in the digital? How are digital technologies both enabling and at the same time conditioning participation with/in platforms? How are they mediated? Who mediates them? Do digital media technologies empower/emancipate? 
• Where does participation with/in the digital happen? Here we might look at exploring networks, social media, platforms, but also other spaces where the digital and the non-digital merge, such as gaming and virtual reality.
• What kinds of research do we do with/in the digital? Here we might consider how researchers have approached the digital by doing research with/in it, mixing disciplines and methodologies or new ways to do research.

Committee

The organising committee is made up of MA and PhD students at CIM.

Invited Speakers

• David Garcia (Bournemouth University)
• Christian Nold (University College London)

Venue

The conference will be held at Warwick University - Thursday, 27 June 2019 PS1.28

NB  If you have any special requirements or if for any reason you will not be able to attend the conference at certain times, please let us know and we will endeavour to accommodate your requirements. Unfortunately we are not able to offer childcare for this event, but babies and children are welcome. The University of Warwick is wheelchair accessible. If you require more information regarding accessibility please contact us.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to cimpgconf2019@livewarwickac.onmicrosoft.com

NB 

A PDF version of the call for papers can be accessed via  https://docdro.id/cknD6TP