CFP: residual media

CALL FOR PAPERS
A book collection of work on media and cultural history


RESIDUAL MEDIA

No phrase has been evacuated of meaning, and has outlived its critical 
usefulness, faster than "new media."  If there is a reigning myth of media, 
it is that technological change necessarily involves the "new."  This 
preoccupation risks neglecting the crucial role of continuity in the 
historical process.  Rather than consisting solely of dramatic rupture, the 
dynamics of culture bump along unevenly, dragging the familiar into novel 
contexts.  Raymond Williams's attention to emergent, dominant, and residual 
forms has long alerted us to the varying forces of historical change and to 
the lacunae that result from examining the emergent in isolation.  Residual 
Media will be a corrective to contemporary scholarship's fetishization of 
the "new."

Papers are sought for this edited collection of interdisciplinary research 
in cultural history exploring reconfigured, renewed, recycled, disposed, 
neglected, abandoned, and trashed media technologies and practices.  What 
is the process by which media, and their related devices, texts, objects, 
spaces and competencies, fade away?  How do some - whether in archives or 
attics, minds or training manuals - become the background for the 
introduction of other forms?  In what manner do they reappear as 
environmental problems, as the "new" elsewhere, as collectables, as 
memories, and as art?  What are the qualities of our everyday engagement 
with the half-life of media forms and practices?  Residual Media will bring 
together original scholarly work on these and related issues, combining 
theoretical essays on the problems of media historiography with studies of 
specific residual forms, practices and materials.  Work may investigate any 
number of visual, sound, projection, broadcast, and writing 
technologies.  Proposals are due January 15, 2003, preferably sent by 
email.  They will include a 250-word description of the research, a sample 
bibliography and a one-paragraph author's biography.

Send proposals to:

Dr. Charles Acland
Associate Professor
Communication Studies
Concordia University
7141 Sherbrooke St. W.
Montreal, QC  H4B 1R6
Canada

Email  craclan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Fax  514-848-4257
Phone for 2002-2003:  612-825-9060


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