Symposium
“What’s New about New Media? The Technology of Protest Past
and Present”
Department of History
Carleton University, Ottawa Canada
April 23-24, 2015
Carleton University, Ottawa Canada
April 23-24, 2015
From the G8 demonstrations to the Occupy Movements, Idle No
More, and revolutions in the Middle East, the last few years have witnessed a
phenomenal upswing in the use of social media in popular protest. Social
technology has played an important role in mobilizing grassroots opposition
and, according to some scholars and pundits, it has served to politicize a broader
base, bringing about greater participation in and new forms of civic action.
Activists use platforms like Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to raise
consciousness around lightning-rod issues. New technologies aid in the
organization of demonstrations. They help mobilize emotions, map out logistics,
and after all is said and done, they catalogue and document opposition success
and further challenges. Social media’s democratizing potential is not without
its detractors, however, and alongside concerns for the protection of privacy
and surveillance, skeptics question whether networked publics really can serve
as meaningful spaces of protest and opposition.
In lending shape to everyday opposition, cataloguing images
of excess and exuberance, and circulating them in networked publics, there can
be no doubt Web 2.0 is writing a history of the present. Yet aside from the
thorny issue of impact, it is worth asking how new is new media in the way it
shapes protest and opposition? This two-day symposium takes a longue durée
approach to this question. It aims to bring together early modern historians
with modernists and media/communications scholars to interrogate what is in
fact new, different, and unique about how “old” and “new” media have
structured, popularized, given voice to, and helped mobilize protest and
opposition across time and space.
We will discuss pre-circulated papers of 15 pages in length.
Each paper should demonstrate a conceptual engagement with the interplay of
time and place-specific media and their relation to public sentiment and
opposition. We will also have two keynote addresses, one from a communications
scholar, the other from an historian.
Themes may include:
- vernacular forms of protest across time and media
- protest and public engagement, diverse publics, counterpublics
- protest and affect
- protest as performance, the staging of opposition, counter protest and solidarity
- visualizing, spatializing, or mapping violence, resistance, and identity
- media, self, and subjectivity – forging activist or oppositional selves
- networks of opposition and collusion
- rethinking the local, the regional, and the global
- mediatized protest: chronicle, archive, database, scrapbook
- media, protest, and public/social memory
Please forward a short CV and a 1-2 page paper abstract to
the following address by December 15th, 2014.
