<nettime-ann> CFP- CANADIAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES

[roberta buiani <robb@yorku.ca>]

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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES

CALL FOR PAPERS

2009 marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of Jean-François  
Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. “[I}t is  
common knowledge,” he wrote, “that the miniaturization and  
commercialization of machines is already changing the way learning is  
acquired, classified, made available, and exploited” (1984, org. 1979:  
4). In 2010, “Connected Understanding” will be the theme of the  
Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities in Montreal (http://www.fedcan.virtuo.ca/congress2010/ 
). The Canadian Journal of Media Studies announces a special issue on  
Media, Knowledge and the Network University edited by Bob Hanke, York  
University, and David Spencer, University of Western Ontario.

The massification and informationalization of the university has  
transformed not only the content of teaching and research but also  
disciplinary processes of knowledge production and the technological  
form of academic life and culture. The integration and normalization  
of ICT's raises many questions about the university, academic labour,  
scholarly communication and collaboration, and academic technoculture.  
In 1957, Marshall McLuhan invited us to reconsider the education  
process by announcing that, with the advent of television, the  
“classroom without walls” had arrived. A half a century later, we are  
working in the university without walls and the ICT  “revolution” is  
over. In “Universities, wet, hard, and harder,” German media theorist  
Friedrich Kittler reviewed 800 years of university-based media history  
to observe that “universities have finally succeeded in forming once  
again a complete media system.” Yet media scholars have rarely chosen  
to study their own universities as media systems. This special issue  
of the CJMS is an invitation to reflexive, critical media studies.  
Established and emerging scholars are invited to address continuities  
and transformations in new media and the network university and to set  
the agenda for future study and debate.

Possible questions and areas of research and critical inquiry include:

What is unthought, unrepresented and unquestioned in discussions of  
the public university and the ‘neoliberal turn,’ technologically- 
mediated post-secondary education, and institutional initiatives in  
the virtualization of the educational process?

What is the impact of the cybernation of the university? What is  
happening in information technology (IT) infrastructure, planning and  
governance? What IT strategies are pursued by specific institutions in  
different jurisdictions? What is the role of IT professionals as  
intermediaries between IT industries, intermediating organizations,  
private-sector partners and the university? What is the faculty  
experience of ICTs, and IT “solutions,” services, and support?

What are the networks of possibility and affordances of technology,  
and what are the obstacles and limits? the unintended, unanticipated  
consequences?

What hybrid methodologies, research techniques and software enhance  
our capacity to map the wireless campus and network condition of the  
university?

What philosophers of technology and politics are relevant to  
sharpening our thinking on the question of technology? What scholarly  
perspectives on invention, innovation and the process of emergence  
enable us to break the habit of instrumentalist thinking and discard  
the “tool” metaphor? How can we take technical artifacts, from small,  
portable technology to entire campus networks, out of their “black  
boxes” in order to study them? How does the technical substrate matter  
to our thinking? Our reading and writing of “texts”? Our notions of  
“research”?

How is the university embedded in the network society and cognitive  
capitalism? What are the drivers of IT change in universities? What  
are the consequences of the disjuncture between the digital culture  
and practices outside the university and IT (planning, procurement/ 
evaluation/implementation, support and services) inside universities?
How can we move beyond user-centric approaches to Web 2.0 based  
software applications and learning management systems, peer-to-peer  
networks, and small tech in academic settings? In the new network  
culture, how can we grasp the relations between what is “given” and  
what is unlikely, surprising, unexpected and unrealized?

How can we move beyond debates over “student centered” learning and  
faculty deskilling to new models of reskilling and organized research  
networks, technological literacy and technologies of the common? How  
can we articulate scholarly “collaboration” and student “engagement”  
with a politics of knowledge (commodified knowledge, open scholarship  
and knowledge within the social sciences and humanities, popular  
knowledge, indigenous knowledge, etc.) that will strengthen the public  
mission of the university after the recession? How can we turn away  
from the “knowledge economy” and towards knowledge cultures? What does  
the prototype of the Canadian Institute for Health Research’s  
Knowledge Broker Model portend for the social sciences and humanities?

We also invite investigations of:

•        computerization, campus networking strategies, and ICT- 
related organizational change since the advent of distributed  
computing, the Internet and the WWW
•        space, time, speed and rhythm in the network university
•        the production and operativity of networks and archives,  
scholarly journals and portals, web-based learning environments and  
objects, research cyberinfrastructure, critical cyberpedagogy,  
technological literacy, copyright/left, intellectual property rights
•        open access movement, open access research, open educational  
resources, open courseware, institutional repositories, ‘Do it  
Yourself’ education or edupunk
•        tropes of factory, ecology, network, mobility, common
•        articulations and destabilizations of oral/written, actual/ 
virtual, bureaucratic records/institutional memory, off-line/on line,  
knowledge creation/information sharing, formal learning on campus/ 
informal learning off campus, amateur/professional, artist/researcher
•       ideology of convenience, ethos of performativity, immaterial  
academic labour, general intellect, circuits of knowledge and struggle
•        technological “progress,”“knowledge economy,” knowledge  
“transfer” or “mobilization,” creativity, innovation, academic  
freedom, academic capitalism
•        the coming network university, knowledge futures, ecoethical  
perspectives on the university’s inputs and outputs and the discourse  
of “sustainability”

Since intellectual innovation may be engendered at the intersections  
of disciplines, contributions are welcome from outside of  
Communication and traditions and trajectories of media studies outside  
of Canada. Solo or collaborative work that provides a comparative,  
international perspective on the network university in different  
countries is especially welcome.

Submission Guidelines

Authors should submit papers of about 25 pages (or 8000 words) in MLA  
style with abstract and keywords electronically to David Spencer,  
Editor,dspencer@uwo.ca. With the exception of the title page, please  
remove all indications of authorship.

The deadline for papers is February 28, 2010. Peer review and  
notification of acceptance will be completed by March 31, 2010. Final  
manuscripts accepted for publication will be due April 30, 2010.

Comments and queries can be sent to Bob Hanke, Guest Co-Editor, bhanke@yorku.ca 
.
For more information about the Canadian Journal of Media Studies,  
visit http://cjms.fims.uwo.ca/default.htm
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