CFP for SCMS 2018 (Toronto, Canada, Wednesday, March 14– Sunday, March 18)
Panel topic: Imagining War and Conflict in the Digital Age
The 2016 U.S. presidential election—and indeed, its aftermath—stoked nationwide conversations about the world’s entry into an age of “digital war” or “information warfare,” defined as the use of digital technology to disrupt a nation’s information systems, from hacking nuclear power plants to using social media to influence elections. Yet this is part of a broader global shift in the conduct of war and international relations. Within the last three decades, the world has seen a surge in war and conflict built on the back of digital media and technology, exemplified by a shift towards unmanned aerial warfare, cyberwarfare, media manipulation efforts, and digital surveillance practices. No longer are conflicts predominantly defined by heroic masculine soldiers charging forth from the trenches to courageously attack an enemy; instead, war is increasingly being driven by digital technology, from the screens through which drone pilots capture their images to botnet attacks designed to take down entire cities’ infrastructures.
Accompanying that shift in global politics has been an ensuing shift in cinematic, televisual, and ludic representations of state conflict. From films like Eye in the Sky and Sneakers to television shows like Homeland and Mr. Robot to videogames like Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Watch Dogs, these forms of digitally-driven conflict have found a home in popular culture as much as they have found a home in everyday life.
This panel will examine the cultural politics of those media forms that engage with such forms of conflict, and the ways that such representations engage in important conversations about security, identity, transnationalism, and power. Although papers will ideally engage in a variety of topics, the crux of the panel’s discussion can be found in the following questions:
1. How has the growing role of digital technologies in war—and, indeed, of digital war itself—shaped popular visions of conflict?
2. What can representations of digital attacks tell us about contemporary hopes and anxieties about contemporary national or global [in] security?
3. To what extent do race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion and/or sexuality interact with visions of security and national power in an age of digital conflict?
4. Can such media representations afford a space for resistance against or critique of intrusive or immoral state action?
Potential paper topics include (but are not limited to):
Preliminary panel bibliography (tentative)
Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (London: Verso, 2014).
Stacy Takacs, Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2012).
Catherine Zimmer, Surveillance Cinema (New York: New York University Press, 2015).
To submit, please send a 250-300 word abstract, brief bio, and 3-5 citations by August 7, 2017 to Carrie Andersen ([log in to unmask]).