CFP: DHSI, Culture Mapping Symposium
NewYorkScapes is excited to invite proposals for the 2022 Culture Mapping symposium, our annual conference exploring the intersection of culture, place, and digital methods. This year’s conference will take place virtually on April 7-9, with in-person components (public health guidance permitting) at NYU’s Washington Square campus.
Culture Mapping 2022 seeks to assemble scholars, students, archivists and information managers, artists, activists, and other practitioners to reflect on the use of archival materials in understanding the information practices that encode and normalize injustice. Informed by the work of scholars like Saidiya Hartman and Jessica Marie Johnson, who have examined the lasting ramifications (“afterlives”) of slavery and its records, as well as those like Safiya Umoja Noble, who explore the ways in which everyday technologies reflect and reproduce systemic violence, we invite proposals that foreground archival practice as a means of investigating the fraught nature of “information.”
What roles can archives play in not only the study of historical events, but in learning and teaching the legacies of information and recordkeeping? We ask: How can historical “archives,” loosely construed, illuminate the entanglement of rhetorical and material violence and information storage, processing, and retrieval? What role do archival materials play in information pedagogy in the humanities and social sciences? How does the transformation of archival materials into digital information present or foreclose opportunities for justice-oriented praxis?
Proposals may engage critical, practical, and historical takes on these questions, regardless of discipline. Faculty, librarians, graduate and undergraduate students, staff and administrators, and community members are all encouraged to participate. Potential areas of engagement include but are not limited to:
• Media archaeological approaches to cultural study
• Intersections of “traditional” historical / archival research and critical data studies
• Automation and information histories of labor
• Politics of enumeration; “banal” and bureaucratic forms of violence
• Algorithmic bias and critical AI
• Archives and activism
• Histories of informatics
• Archival and information pedagogy; project- and community-based learning and teaching
• Digitization and data-fication of archives; data management and sustainability
• Living archives
• Resistant, abolitionist, anti-racist, and indigenous epistemologies and archival methods
• Archival logics of / and COVID-19
Submissions can take the form of traditional paper / project presentations (10-20 minutes), five-minute lightning talks, performances, site or platform demos, virtual art exhibits, or roundtable discussions (30-60 minutes). You may also propose a workshop on a methodology in which you have expertise and which you feel would be of broad interest. Proposals should be 200-300 words in length and should describe the proposed topic, requested time length and format, and participants. To submit a proposal, please complete the online submission form.