Call for Papers
Lifestyles • Lifeworlds • Lifeworks: What is Life?
University of Oregon in Portland (USA) • April 6-8, 2017
Today, media constitute and permeate all avenues and forms
of life – scale, pace, and pattern interact in private, public, and organic
systems. As technology encompasses more and more practices and agents, and
becomes evermore malleable and fungible – What is Life? And, how is life
mediated?
In 2017 the seventh annual “What is...?”
conference-experience investigates, imagines, and enacts everyday lifestyles
and lifeworks by emphasizing the lifeworlds we inhabit. Our aim is to build
bridges through multidisciplinary networks along with discovering how
communication is instrumental in and for living systems.
The event will bring together scholars, government and
community officials, industry professionals, alumni and students, as well as
scientists, artists, filmmakers, grassroots community organizations, and the
public. It will feature plenary speakers, roundtables, paper presentations,
installations, and special events.
Presentations/panels/installations may include the following
topics (as well as others):
Communication and Media
- What is media life? How is life mediated? How is life a medium? How do media shape everyday life’s habits?
- How do science communication and ecology inform each other? What is public and/or solutions journalism?
- What are approaches to civic media, engagement, and action for the environment? What is ecosophy?
- How do media draw attention to and motivate certain lifestyles and livelihoods (e.g. crowdsourcing)?
- What ways do technology/media act as life-support/sustaining systems? What is life in an “always-on culture”?
- How do apps, games, and immersive worlds help us to adapt to the ever-changing landscape of mediated life?
- Where are boundaries (dis)integrating between databases and life (e.g. social media and/or bioinformatics)?
- How are language, meaning, mind, and thought grounded in life processes? What is new materialism?
- What are relationships between media archaeology and nature (Geologies of Media and Insect Media)?
- Is life an algorithm (materially and/or symbolically) in big data and data visualization?
Media and The Environment
- How are ecological education and media related (e.g. ecomedia, ecocriticsm, ecodesign, and/or ecoliteracy)?
- How are communication/media and the natural and life sciences coming together (e.g. ecosystem analysis)?
- How is media metabolized (e.g. e-waste)? How can we repair the world (e.g. bio-remediation)
- What are emerging issues in environmental humanities research? What is biomedia and/or bioart?
- How are place and space (environments) related to media and life? What is life enhancement (H+)?
- How does an embodied (material) account of media and science/art contribute to integrative thinking?
- What are indigenous peoples’ rights and issues (e.g. natural resources, autonomy, environmental degradation)?
Sustainability, Responsibility, and Beyond
- What are sustainable cities and livability? What is biourbanism? What is social ecology?
- How do sustainable housing and/or placemaking foster habitats? What are DIY (design) & SLOW (e.g. food)?
- How can sustainability cultivate more diversity and inclusivity (e.g. gender, race, age, socioeconomic class)?
- How are sustainable business and systems thinking intertwined (e.g. triple bottom line, biomimicry)?
- What is corporate social responsibility in public relations? What is social entrepreneurship (e.g. L3C, B-corp)?
- How does advertising enhance/obsolesce sustainability trends (e.g. life-cycle assessment, greenwashing)?
- What are incubators for social, economic, and political change? What is an evolutionary political economy?
- How are collaborative and cooperative projects facilitating ecological praxis (e.g. open source ecology)?
- Are there accounts of aesthetics and ethics that can assist in our understanding of life processes?
- What comes after sustainability? How do we differentiate sustaining from thriving (communities of practice)?
Emergence, Synergy, and Regeneration
- What is biodiversity? What is biocommunication, biosemiotics, bioculture, or bioethics?
- What is biopower, biopolitics, bioeconomics, and/or biosecurity? What is ecofeminism and/or ecospirituality?
- What is artificial life/intelligence and/or synthetic biology? How is life being incorporated?
- How do microbes change our conception of life? How does microbial health relate to the built environment?
- What are black swan events? Who controls life, death, birth and aging? What is integrative medicine?
Conference Organizers: Janet Wasko (University of Oregon)
and Jeremy Swartz (University of Oregon)
Send 100-150 word abstracts/proposals by November 21, 2016,
to: Janet Wasko • jwasko@uoregon.edu
School of Journalism and Communication • University of
Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, 97405-1275, USA
