Conjunctions -Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation
Call for papers: Participatory Cultural Citizenship
Deadline: Papers must be submitted by February 28, 2014. Please visit www.conjunctions-tjcp.com to submit articles and for more information.
Conjunctions – Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation seeks to create a transdisciplinary forum for the investigation of user-generated production and user-driven cultural participation across a variety of social fields and participatory platforms. The overall focus is to explore the socially transformative and democratic potential of cultural participation processes, to qualify the academic understanding of what ‘cultural participation’ is and what itinvolves, and to discuss the complex relations created between user-generated material and established institutions. We invite submissions from a variety of disciplinary fields such as cultural studies, media studies, cultural geography, aesthetics, science and technology studies, health care, information science, sociology, anthropology, and gender studies.
In this first issue we seek papers that address questions of participatory cultural citizenship. For more than a decade the internet has been invested with high hopes for democratic empowerment of non-institutional voices (Jenkins2006, Fenton 2008, Bruns 2008, Gauntlett 2011, Lievrouw 2011), but also, over time, with concerns regarding the type of democratic interaction and the possibilities for citizens’ voices to be heard (Hess 2009, Couldry 2010). Simultaneously, everyday practices such as the found city, opportunistic tactics and spontaneous interventions have become celebrated in studies of urban space (Cuff and Sherman 2011, Stickels 2011, Lang Ho 2012, Chase, Crawford and Kaliski 2008). These processes emphasise collaborative practices and are also reflected in the rise of relational (Bourriaud 1998) and participatory art (Bishop 2012) in which the artist is co-producer of situations and dialogical art practices (Kester 2004, 2011). Accordingly, the recent participatory turn of contemporary cultural analysis and theory gives rise to a suggestion of the end of the passive audience/spectator, and the emergent of collaborative working processes and concepts such as participatory culture, DIY-culture, DIY urbanism, co-creation, produsage, creativeplace-appropriation, everyday creativity, participatory planning, social production and social entrepreneurship.
It is from such perspective that we invite papers that address the opportunities, limits and challenges of collective creation and citizen empowerment and evaluate the political potentials or impacts of cultural participation including non-professionalor ‘vernacular’ production.
Thematically papers can deal with a range of issues e.g.: the formation of social movements, creative online/offline activism, mobilization, social inclusion, artivism, urban planning, critical urban interventions, digital democracy and inclusion, participatory and political aesthetics, DIY urbanism and the concept ‘participatory culture’.
We seek papers that: 1) develop frameworks to design/enable as well as evaluate participatory processes; 2) explore participatory cultural processes as critical practices; 3) ask when and how participation is of value in terms of enabling active citizenship; 4) discuss the relation between bottom-up cultural initiatives and e.g. long-termplanning of spaces, cities and institutions; 5) ask to what extent cultural participation is threatened by institutional and/or economic strategies trying to profit from the work of users.
Camilla Møhring Reestorff
Department of Aesthetics and Communication
University of Aarhus
Jens Chr. Skous Vej 7, 1485/536
8000 Århus C – Denmark
Tlf: (+45) 871 63181 / (+45) 22783252
Email: norcmr@hum.au.dk