CFP / UPCOMING ISSUES
Issue 8: Culture Jam
Guest Editor: Brian Gaines (Virginia Tech)
Due: February 1, 2021
The editor of Culture Jam, special issue of Textshop Experiments, is looking for cultural and media saboteurs for the expressed purpose of protesting, resisting, and disrupting how cultural narratives are being constructed and disseminated. As Black Lives Matter protests, COVID-19, presidential scandals, and other happenings are leaving indelible marks on the annals of history, fundamental questions concerning the formation of the dominant narratives must be asked. Who is writing these cultural narratives? Who decides who creates these narratives? How will they be remembered? Are these constructed narratives accurate portrayals of how these events transpired? Are they legitimate?
Considering the deluge of extraordinary events that have taken place and are currently taking place in 2020—at the nexus of the political, racial, scientific, and cultural, to name a few—we are truly living in fantastic times. As Marshall McLuhan posited, “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation” (66). Therefore, we very may well be in the throes of battle, especially in terms of how cultural events are perceived.
Media in many forms are advancing certain narratives as axiomatic in an era that increasingly adheres to the Burroughsian mantra that “nothing is true; everything is permitted.” We who make culture our business can engage in “participatory decentralization, a mantra of art and political networks,” and “subversive maneuvers,” (dj readies 1) in what may be viewed as a mirroring of a society of spectacle. However, as purveyors of culture production, we are inextricably bound to the bureaucracy of “codes, passwords, and links” of a “productive mythology” (readies 2). To put another way, we subvert the dominant narratives through using the systems that write those narratives.
Considering the idea of subversion in electrate writing practices and “New Media” applications, we are well-versed in the power of media to shape culture. Through re-envisaging turns and tropes, we can create commentary and art that subverts dominant narratives and resists the co-option of our shared culture.
We invite contributors to participate in this new issue of Textshop Experiments with the following:
Essays and Video Essays
We are looking for essays 3,000-5,000 words or 7-10 minutes in length that examine, critique, and subvert how current issues are constructed and presented. Please send essays as docx files and videos as mp4.
Audio Projects
Podcasting, sound collage, audio remixes, and original song compositions that challenge and subvert dominant narratives will be considered. Please submit in mp3 format.
Visual Art
Posters, short documentary films, man-on-the-street reporting, media remixes, billboard liberation, homemade stickers, zines, wheat pasting campaigns, design projects, installations, user manuals for media hijinks/détournement, databending, protester fashion and/or fashion shows and other visual ideas will be considered.
Webtexts
Digitally-born texts, including bots, hypertexts, digital zines, journal entries and blog posts, or other emerging writing technologies are also encouraged.
The deadline for submission is February 1, 2021. If you’d like to contribute to this issue or propose an idea, please send queries, proposals or completed projects to editor Brian Gaines at blgaine@vt.edu. Additional information may be found at http://textshopexperiments.org/.
Pedagogy Pop Up: a Textshop Experiments special issue
Guest Editors: Mari Ramler (Tennessee Tech University) and Dan Frank (UC Santa Barbara)
Due: July 1, 2020
In this Call for Projects and Practices, Textshop Experiments seeks to acknowledge and celebrate the digital resilience, creativity, and adaptability that instructors in higher education demonstrated in response to the onset of COVID-19 and a sudden pivot to alternate delivery and online instruction. Over the past several months, we saw you lead with empathy, experiment with new technology, and communicate grace. In short, you made it work. This special issue serves as a witness to your invisible labor and as a resource for future instruction.
If you would like to join us in this special issue, first let us know:
Who are you?
Where and what do you teach?
Please include a brief biography (150 words or less with an optional photo). We seek submissions from every academic rank (including graduate students) and across disciplines.
Then, we invite submissions across any, or all, of the following questions:
What did you do?
We invite digital projects, ad-hoc syllabi, or digitally-mediated classroom activities that worked well, provoked interesting results, or were otherwise impactful.
How did you do it?
Where did you (re)create your at-home workspace?
What changes did you make to your workflow, work strategies, or schedule?
What challenges with space, place, technology, or time did you overcome?
What did you learn?
What did these experiences teach you about
Yourself as an educator?
Best practices in pedagogy?
Experiments that worked or did not work?
Your assumptions about education?
Technologies or forms of digitally mediated communication?
Forms and Formats
We accept work in the following formats: doc, docx, jpg, png, mp3, mp4, mov.
We invite stories, written descriptions, prompts, videos, pictures.
If submitting a syllabus, reading list, activity/assignment, workspace photos / tours, or related project or document(s) (digital or text-based), please accompany that work with a brief introduction or personal statement that contextualizes the submission: Where does this project fit in with the schedule and standards of the class? What skills were you hoping to teach and/or scaffold? (500-1000 words)
Personal narratives, testimonials, and other essay formats should be limited to 1500 words or 5 minutes (audio / video).
The turnaround time for this issue is short: we’re aiming for an August release. We suspect you already have most of the submission materials on hand from the spring semester. Queries about the CFP or the journal may be sent to the Editors via the Contact form on the website.
If you’d like to contribute, please send your manuscript / media to Mari Ramler at mramler@tntech.edu and Dan Frank at dmfrank@writing.ucsb.edu by July 1, 2020.
COMING SOON . . .
Issue 9: Monumentality and Digital Heritage
Issue 10: Altered / Altared Books
Book Reviews
We also accept artwork, exhibition reviews, and conference reports for future issues. If you would like to be considered for future reviews, please send an email, including your name; academic/professional affiliation, department and position; and a list of your current research or areas of interest to the editors at ulmertextshop@gmail.com. You are welcome to select 1-3 titles from the list of received books listed below. This list will be updated every two weeks. While we do accept unsolicited reviews and artwork, artists and reviewers are encouraged to query the editors before submission.
Books Received
Ag, Tanya Toft. Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art (Intellect, 2019).
Barnes, Renee. Uncovering Online Commenting Culture: Trolls, Fanboys and Lurkers (Palgrave 2018).
Bassett, Caroline, Sarah Kember and Kate O’Riordan. Furious: Technological Feminism and Digital Futures (Pluto Press, 2020).
Berland, Jody. Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures (MIT Press, 2019).
Brott, Simone. Digital Monuments: The Dreams and Abuses of Iconic Architecture (Routledge, 2019).
Browner, Tara and Thomas L. Riis, ed. Rethinking American Music (University of Illinois Press, 2019).
Cecire, Natalia. Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).
Child, Danielle. Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Cooper, Marilyn M. The Animal Who Writes: A Posthumanist Composition (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).
Cunningham, Carolyn M. Games Girls Play: Contexts of Girls and Video Games (Lexington Books, 2018).
Dinnen, Zara. The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture (Columbia University Press, 2018).
Fuchs, Christian. Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter (Pluto, 2018).
Gavaler, Chris and Nathaniel Goldberg. Superhero Thought Experiments: Comic Book Philosophy (University of Iowa Press, 2019).
Gray-Rosendale, Laura, ed. Getting Personal: Teaching Personal Writing in the Digital Age (SUNY Press, 2018).
Haworth, Michael. Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
Hodge, James J. Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
James, David. Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Klaren, Alexandra. On Becoming Neighbors: The Communication Ethics of Fred Rogers (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).
Losh, Elizabeth and Jacqueline Wernimont. Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
Mallgrave, Harry Francis. From Object to Experience: The New Culture of Architectural Design (Bloomsbury, 2018).
Maxwell, Jason. The Two Cultures of English: Literature, Composition, and the Moment of Rhetoric (Fordham University Press, 2019).
Nass, Michael. Plato and the Invention of Life (Fordham University Press, 2018).
Paliewicz, Nicholas S. and Marouf Hasian. The Securitization of Memorial Space: Rhetoric and Public Memory (University of Nebraska Press, 2019).
Richter, Gerhard. Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoercive Gaze (Fordham University Press, 2019).
Shanbaum, Phaedra. The Digital Interface and New Media Art Installations (Routledge, 2020).
Zielinski, Siegfried. Variations on Media Thinking (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
Other Calls for Papers: PROBLEMS B US
Lead Investigators
K. A. Wisniewski, American Antiquarian Society
Scott D. Sundvall, University of Memphis
Sergio C. Figueiredo, Kennesaw State University
Description
Gregory L. Ulmer, media theorist, first coined the term electracy in Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy (2003) to describe the apparatus shift from print literacy to electronic media. It encompasses not only the cultural, institutional, pedagogical, and ideological implications inherent in the transition but also offers a theoretical and methodological framework for composing new artistic and scholarly works. Ulmer’s emphasis on heuretics (invention), as distinguished from the primarily literate practice of hermeneutics (interpretation), reflects the necessary convergence of aesthetics and theory in the age of electracy.
In Illogic to Sense: The Gregory L. Ulmer Remix Anthology (2001), Darren Tofts and Lisa Guy place Ulmer’s work as “central to contemporary thinking about the future of writing, of schooling and paradigms of learning, [and of] the dynamics of creativity and the poetics of invention,” as well as how existing institutions take on new social roles and responsibilities. Ulmer’s work has now influenced scholars and artists working in fields including literature, rhetoric, writing studies, philosophy, performance art, architecture, and political science and public policy. Ulmer’s use of “konsult” as practice and method, most recently detailed in his work on “theopraxesis,” provides signposts for how we can apply electrate logic in a trans-disciplinary manner to tackle the fundamental question of collective well-being. In short, as Ulmer notes, “Problems B Us.”
Despite Ulmer’s influence, directly and indirectly cited in a host of works, his home-spun “puncepts” demand further development. This project collects original essays from emerging / early-career scholars and artists working in elecracy. The title, “Problems B Us,” is the slogan of Ulmer’s EmerAgency and subverts the traditional literate-centric work of consultants. In this new model, problems explain the field, the situation, the method, and contributors / participants. Each chapter of this anthology takes on a particular theme, puncept, or discipline to investigate and demonstrate the implications of electrate methods on the future of the respective fields of study in question.
The editors of this collection especially encourage collaborative chapter proposals from diverse voices that demonstrate the social, cultural, and transdisciplinary inclusivity of all things electrate.
Potential Topics may include the following:
● The future of education
● Politics, community engagement and social justice
● Environmental rhetoric and eco-criticism
● Art, architecture, and design
● Publishing
● University and writing programs, administration, and infrastructure
● Memory, memorialization, and monumentality
● Film, sound and media studies
● Augmented reality
● Economy and/as shared sense of value
● Ethics, prudence, and decorum
● Rhetorics of truth and reality
● Function, purpose, and future of the humanities
● Development and distribution of knowledge/information
● Language, coding, and programming
● Science and the arts (and the conjunction of the two)
Final 5,000-6,000-word essays will be due in August 2021.
Please send chapter abstracts (200-300 words) and a current CV as doc or docx files to the editors at problemsbus@gmail.com by March 1, 2021.
Upcoming Issues & How to Get Involved
We have an exciting line-up of themed and open issues coming up, including
Renku (連句)
STAND-UP: The Comedy Issue
Anti-Method: CATTts
Tissues 2.0
More information will be provided soon . . . Textshop Experiments is always seeking ideas for upcoming issues. If you have a suggestion or are interested in serving as a guest editor, please contact the editors via the Contact page.
We are also interested in producing/publishing/collaborating in longer digital works and are in the early stages of an original pamphlet/chapbook series. Individuals interested in learning more should contact the editors directly.