Call for abstracts: Graduate Conference 2022: un:real Spaces of Interaction: Forms of Social Order in the Spectrum of Media-specific Interaction, 4-5 November, 2022, Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies, Potsdam, Germany. Deadline: 30 June 2022.
The graduate student conference “un:real Spaces of Interaction. Forms of Social Order in the Spectrum of Media-specific Interaction” focuses on media-specific interaction spaces and the construction of social orders and realities. Therefore, the overarching question of the conference is concerned with the emergence, change, and shaping of interaction spaces in the spectrum between human-human and human-machine, in which actors communicate with each other through or with technologies.
Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has given new importance to understanding and thinking about interaction spaces, online and offline. Following Erving Goffman’s notion of interaction and related key aspects of interactions, we consider how media-specific interactions are understood and analysed within media studies and media linguistic perspectives. Possible approaches include interface studies and affect theory as well as sociolinguistic studies of human-machine interaction and multimodal interaction analysis. Despite the different theoretical and methodological approaches, it becomes clear that interaction in, with, or through media makes sociocultural transformations visible. They unfold in the form of new social realities “such as virtual space[s], public spheres, or popular culture, which are hardly conceivable without media-based mediation” (Marx/Schmidt 2019, 12). These spaces of interaction move at the intersections of analogue and digital, online and offline, human and machine, real and unreal.
The conference is intended to provide a space in which Master’s students of higher semesters (from 3rd semester) and doctoral candidates from the fields of media linguistics and media studies, but also other associated humanities with relevance to media studies such as sociology, political science, aesthetics and art history, film studies, cultural studies, journalism, philosophy, science and technology studies, or cognitive science can present their research work.
NOTE: While this call does not specifically request work relating to intercultural dialogue, the topic seems particularly appropriate for it.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 