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Read more about Conjunctions has moved to De Gruyter's Sciendo platformArticle deadline: April 6, 2020 (extended)
Patterns of cultural participation have been the focus of policy research for decades. Particularly since the millennium, quantitative data, often collected by governments, has established the notion of ‘non-participation’ as a ‘problem’ that the state needs to address (Balling and Kann-Christensen, 2013; Jancovich 2015 Stevenson, 2013, Stevenson et al., 2015). Yet despite decades of policies and projects to address this and a growing body of research, carried out by consultants and academics, celebrating the success of such interventions in addressing social inclusion and increasing personal wellbeing, the same ‘problem’ appears to remain in regard to the diversity of people who engage with state supported cultural organisations and activities (Warwick Commission, 2015). It has even been claimed that Europe is becoming it is becoming a “less cultural continent” (European Commission, 2013).
The way in which many projects, organisation and artists are funded and evaluated, combined with the state of financial precarity in which a large number permanently function, means that stories of failure about how cultural participation policies and projects have been enacted are largely overlooked and even supressed in the dominant discourses of cultural policy. This limits and reduces the capacity for “social learning” (May 1992) which may better facilitate change. Without an honest acknowledgement and critically reflective exploration into the nature and extent of failure present in the existing projects and policies by which cultural participation is supposedly supported, then the legitimacy of the status quo will remain difficult to challenge.
This special edition of Conjuctions invites contributions that explore the role and place of failure in regard to cultural participation. We invite empirical, theoretical and practice informed contributions from across a range of disciplines. Topics may include, but need not be confined to, the following:
Articles should be between 6000-8000 words, including endnotes, captions and headings. All articles will undergo blind peer review for final selection in the special edition
Any questions related to this special edition can be sent to the guest editors:
Dr Leila Jancovich: l.jancovich@leeds.ac.uk
Dr David Stevenson: dstevenson@qmu.ac.uk
Submissions can be made at: https://tidsskrift.dk/tcp/index
Deadline for submissions: April 6, 2020 (extended)
Read more about CfP: Special issue on Failures in Cultural ParticipationAbstract submission: October 1, 2019 (Article abstracts, 500 words incl. title and 5-7 keywords. Author bio 50 words)
Article deadline: January 10, 2020
To an increasing extent we are using media to make sense of, communicate about or track our health, physical as well as mental. With this issue of Conjunctions we wish to explore this expanding and interdisciplinary field of media and health and emerging forms of participation in health through media. The issue aims for a deeper understanding of how and with what consequences digital and social media are becoming an integral part of how medical practitioners as well as private persons practice, communicate about and understand health and illness. The topic of media and health invite scholars to consider how perceptions of health, health practices and the life of patients are changing with the interweaving of digital media participation.
This special issue addresses the multiple ways in which the uses of digital media contribute to the reconfiguring of traditional doctor- and patient roles – and practices as well as culturally constructed perceptions of health and illness. How do the participatory affordances of digital technologies change perceptions of what it means to be healthy and how we cope with illness? What is at stake as patients become more engaged in their health, illness, visits to the GP through the use of tracking devices, social media and information searching?
Scholars are invited to focus on the role of digital media of all kinds in new health practices. We encourage an interdisciplinary approach coupling media studies on health with sociological, cultural or healthcare perspectives. Empirical analyses as well as methodological and theoretical discussions are welcomed. As health practices and perceptions differ greatly across the world, we invite contributions from a broad range of social and cultural contexts.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Timeline:
Abstracts or any questions regarding this special issue should be sent to: makl@sdu.dk
Read more about CfP: Special issue on Health, media and participationDeadline: Papers must be submitted by August 20, 2019
This special issue of Conjunctions addresses new and historical forms of feminism, everyday activism and social movements dealing with gender related issues and struggles around the world. We invite contributions that explore the protest repertoires, imaginations and practices of movements that fight for political, social, cultural, juridical or economic rights, as well as theoretical contributions that explores theories of feminism, gender, gender theory, queer theory and gender activism. Furthermore, we welcome contributions that analyse examples of everyday activism, popular culture and cultural resistance.
We invite empirical, theoretical and activist contributions from across disciplines, and especially welcome articles that explores the interconnections between ethnicity, class and gender and/or the relationship feminism, Marxism, post-colonialism, socialism and anarchism.
Topics may include, but need not be confined to, the following:
Deadline for submission: 28 Feburary 2018
In prolongation of Affect and Social Media #3 /Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation /welcomes proposals that interpret and explore affective and emotional encounters with social media and the ways in which the interfaces of social media in return modulate affectivity. Fake news have come to be a highly debated framework to understand the consequences of the entanglements of affect, politics and social media. But theories on fake news often fail to grasp the consequences and significance of social media content that are not necessarily fake, but are merely intended to affectively intensify certain political positions.
It is in this context that it becomes crucial to understand the role of affect in relation to the ways in which social media interfaces function, how affective relations are altered on social media and not least how politics is transformed in the attempt to capitalize on the affective relations and intensities potentially fostered on social media.
This special issue invites empirical, theoretical and practical contributions that focus on recent (political) media events - such as Brexit, the US and French elections and the refugee crisis - and how these unfolded on, and are informed by, social media. Proposals might, for instance, address how the Trump campaign allows us to develop a new understanding of the relationship between social media and politics. As such the issue seeks papers that develop new understandings of affective politics and take into account shared experiences, affective intensities, emotional engagements and new entanglements with social media.
Read more about CfP: Affect, Social Media, PoliticsDeadline: Papers must be submitted by August 15, 2017
Special issue editors: Lorena Sancho Querol and Claudia Carvalho (Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal)
Cultural researchers across disciplines are increasingly investigating and experimenting with practice-led, creative and participatory methodologies and approaches. This academic rethinking of research practices could on the one hand be understood as a long-waited willingness to not only look at, but also engage socially with, what is researched. On the other hand it could be approached as a result of an increasing pressure on academic research to create more tangible/inclusive results and effects.
This special issue addresses the multiple ways in which community research practices and methodologies can positively influence active citizenship and nurture social transformation in both rural and urban areas (e.g. a neighbourhood), in specific cultural settings and in various types of institutions (e.g. cultural and media institutions, health institutions). But also the challenges raised by participatory-creative research in terms of their potential renegotiation of established notions of autonomous-critical research, academic quality, effect and ownership.
Read more about Call for papers: Community and Creative Research. Developing Participatory MethodologiesDeadline: Papers must be submitted by August 7, 2015
Play is a powerful source in people’s encounters with their everyday life, surroundings and society. Furthermore, play is increasingly intertwined with a range of different fields, from learning, exercising and city planning to creative work relations. Identities are built through playful interactions with games (Sutton-Smith, 1997) and social media, playful learning engages students’ abilities and competencies, and organisations use play as a motor for innovation and engagements. The attempts to utilise playful behaviour in cultural, educational as well as organisational contexts reveal tensions when rational social organisation meets forms of playful participation that are less bound by instrumental obligations. In this special issue we call for papers that investigate these inherent contradictions of playful participation, for instance by asking the fundamental question: What exactly is playful participation? But also: How might playful encounters motivate participation? To what extent can playful participation be utilised for e.g. cultural or educational purposes without losing sight of ‘being playful’? And how does playfulness challenge pre-established norms of participation? Papers might address questions of playful participation in relation to fields such as, but not limited to, playful culture, playful learning, playful cities and playful organisations.
Read more about Call for papers: Playful ParticipationDeadline: Practice-based papers must be submitted by August 7, 2015
Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation aims to create a forum in which academics and practitioners can share reflections regarding the possibilities and difficulties involved in participatory practices. In this special issue we therefore seek practice-based papers and projects that report experiences with playful participation. Papers might report and document projects related to fields such as playful culture, playful learning, playful cities and playful organisations. Besides reporting on specific projects, the papers might discuss and reflect on how playfulness is utilised with or without success to motivate participation, as well as reflecting on how playful participation can be evaluated: When is playful participation successful?
Papers and projects can be in the form of 3,000-word papers or primarily visual documentation.
Read more about Call for practice-based papers and projects: Playful ParticipationThe concept of participation is experiencing its transdisciplinary heyday. This is not least due to a range of broad cultural and technological transformations that challenge established relations between e.g. media institutions and media users, citizens and authorities, companies and consumers, patients and health systems. It is therefore important to clarify how participation is practiced and researched, and to discuss the value (or non-value) of acclaimed participatory processes. This issue explores ‘transdisciplinary participation’. The goal is to clarify how various disciplines understand and use the concept of ‘participation’, and how they distinguish between participation, collaboration, cooperation, involvement, interaction, and co-creation etc. and to investigate if and how it is possible to develop a common understanding of participation which can be deployed across disciplines, while also taking into consideration the inherent complexities of participation.
Deadline: May 15, 2015.
Read more about Call for Papers: Participation Across, Between and Beyond Disciplines and InstitutionsWe are happy to announce that the first issue of ‘Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation’ is online. It includes articles by David Gauntlett & Amy Twigger Holroyd, Rimi Khan & Audrey Yue, Karen Hvidfeldt Madsen, Sonja Vivienne, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik & Sangita Shresthova, Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Brian Benjamin Hansen & Carsten Høy Gemal and an introduction by Camilla Møhring Reestorff, Carsten Stage, Jonas Fritsch, Jan Løhmann Stephensen and Louise Fabian.
At the conference "RETHINK: Participatory Cultural Citizenship" the Aarhus based agency SideProjects, Abdul Dube and René Sørensen, developed a ZINE FACTORY. Throughout the conference the participants cocreated a zine documenting the conference and our shared experience of participatory cultural citizenship. See the creative reflection on participatory cultural citizenship here:
http://issuu.com/sidepzine/docs/reparcc0001
Read more about Conference ZineIn recent years participatory and activist practises in the public space have been increasingly entangled with digital networks. This is evident in large-scale protests such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, the various activist practices related to the so-called Arab Spring, the Taksim Gezi Park protests, and in activists groups such as Femen, Pussy Riot, and Anonymous. We seek papers that investigate how digital networks redesign the modalities of activist participation, ask how we can understand the relation between visual culture and activist practises, investigate the institutional limits and opportunities of activism, ask who have stakes in cultural resistance, and investigate the possibility for cultural dissent to emerge as political resistance.
Deadline: Papers must be submitted by December 19, 2014.
Read more about Call for Papers: Mediatized Cultural ActivismFor more than a decade the internet has been invested with high hopes for democratic empowerment of non-institutional voices (Jenkins 2006, Fenton 2008, Bruns 2008, Gauntlett 2011, Lievrouw 2011), but also, over time, with concerns regarding the type of democratic interactionand the possibilities for citizens’ voices to be heard (Hess 2009, Couldry 2010). 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-professional or ‘vernacular’ production.
Deadline: Papers must be submitted by February 28, 2014
Read more about Call for Papers: Participatory Cultural Citizenship