Call for Papers -- New Media, New Politics? (post-) Revolutions in Theory and Practice? (London, 26 April 2013)

[Sign from 2011 protests in Egypt. Image by Sherif9282 via Wikimedia Commons] [Sign from 2011 protests in Egypt. Image by Sherif9282 via Wikimedia Commons]

Call for Papers -- New Media, New Politics? (post-) Revolutions in Theory and Practice? (London, 26 April 2013)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

New Media, New Politics?(post-) Revolutions in Theory and Practice
Friday, 26 April, 2013
University of Westminster, London, UK

It has been two years since the world witnessed millions of Arabs march, strike and fight to remove their repressive regimes. As the Arab popular struggles coincided with a deepening global economic crisis, they found resonance across the globe. We saw the Occupy Movement and Spain’s indignados referring to Tahrir Square, exchanging mutual messages of support. The combination of satellite and internet communication and its contribution to such exchanges and to people’s political consciousness was unparalleled in the history of revolutions. Yet much has changed in two years and the region remains susceptible to interventions at local, regional and global levels.

While initial analyses of media’s role in the turmoil were erratic, at least scholarly tendencies to essentialise the Middle East were shaken. The revolutions simultaneously undermine and foster dominant modes of knowledge production and compel us more strongly than ever to situate our research in the context of state and class power. Accelerating digitisation of culture continues to shape and reshape the way political movements operate, calculate and narrate their politics. There is ultimately a single continuum of contradiction: the revolutions were and are strongly shaped by contradictions, making them notoriously complex and difficult to understand at the levels of theory and mediation. Instead of reiterating prevailing views, this conference will benefit from a two-year perspective on the uprisings to engage in deep critical reflection.

We identify three key phases of analysis: pre-revolution (to December 2010), tipping-point (to March 2011), post-revolution (to the present). Unwrapping the revolutionary epoch in this manner allows new social patterns and dialectical relations to emerge. The conference will address two main tasks. The first is to deconstruct media-related interactions during the three phases. The second is to consider the framing of analytical interventions and mediated articulations of the Arab revolutions in order to question the production of knowledge about them. We welcome papers from scholars and activists that engage critically with sub-themes that may include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • The role of media and communication technologies during previous (e.g. anti-colonial) struggles and what these past experiences tell us about the present
  • Rethinking legacies and lessons of key paradigmatic trends (Orientalism, postmodernism, liberalism, Marxism)
  • How Arab activists’ self-portrayals compare with mass-mediated projections
  • Geo-political interests at work in investigations into internet activism
  • Socio-political implications of the global financial crisis and/or imperialism for different media and communication technologies
  • Everyday utilisation of new media in different demographies (gender, age etc) and geographies (urban/rural, centre/periphery)
  • The impact of digital culture on popular perceptions and, in due course, the construction of collective memory.

We aim to publish selected papers in an edited volume focusing on the juxtaposition of new media, new political organising and alternative frames of analysis.

Programme and Registration

This one-day conference, taking place on Friday, 26th April 2013, will consist of plenaries and parallel workshops to raise new critical insights across disciplinary and geographical boundaries in a collaborative manner. The fee for registration for all participants, including presenters, will be £99, with a concessionary rate of £49 for students, to cover all conference documentation, refreshments and administration costs. Registration will open in February 2013.

Deadline for Abstracts

The deadline for abstracts is January 15th, 2013. Successful applicants will be notified early February 2013. Abstracts should be 300 words. They must include the presenter’s name, affiliation, email and postal addresses, together with the title of the paper and a 150-word biographical note on the presenter.  The abstract should be sent by email to the Events Administrator, Helen Cohen, at journalism@westminster.ac.uk.

Travel Expenses

The Arab Media Centre intends to apply for funding to assist with travel bursaries of selected participants whose own institutions are unable to provide the necessary support. Anyone anticipating that they will need support should make this known when sending their abstract but should also make alternative arrangements in case the funding application is unsuccessful.

 

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      In this episode of Long Form, Hala Rharrit discusses the factors that led her to resign from the US State Department, the mechanisms by which institutional corruption and ideological commitments of officials and representatives ensure US support for Israel, and how US decision-makers consistently violate international law and US laws/legislation. Rharrit also addresses the Trump administration’s claim that South Africa is perpetrating genocide against the country’s Afrikaaner population, and how this intersects with the US-Israeli campaign of retribution against South Africa for hauling Israel before the ICJ on charges of genocide.

    • Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      The entire globe stands behind Israel as it faces its most intractable existential crisis since it started its slow-motion Genocide in 1948. People of conscience the world over are in tears as Israel has completely run out of morals and laws to violate during its current faster-paced Genocide in Gaza. Israelis, state and society, feel helpless, like sitting ducks, as they search and scramble for an inkling of hope that they might find one more human value to desecrate, but, alas, their efforts remain futile. They have covered their grounds impeccably and now have to face the music. This is an emergency call for immediate global solidarity with Israel’s quest far a lot more annihilation. Please lend a helping limb.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      In this episode, Mandy Turner discusses the vital role think tanks play in the policy process, and in manufacturing consent for government policy. Turner recently published a landmark study of leading Western think tanks and their positions on Israel and Palestine, tracing pronounced pro-Israel bias, where the the key role is primarily the work of senior staff within these institutions, the so-called “gatekeepers.”

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412