CfP Media’s Mapping Impulse

Media’’s
Mapping
Impulse
Call
For
Papers

 
Cartography
is
one
of
the
oldest
forms
of
media.

In
both
cartography
and
media,
meaning,
ideology, and
power
are
habitually
arbitrated
across
and
through
space
and
time.

While
critical cartographers
have
shed
light
on mapping’’s
innate
tendency toward
the
objectification
of
spatial relations,
a
(masculine)
gaze
that
it
cannot
disown,
these
same
power
relations
are
equally
embedded
in
media’’s
voyeuristic
and controlling
tendencies.

Media,
moreover,
in
all
its
diverse forms,
has
an
underlying mapping
impulse
– –
a
proclivity
to
comprehend
itself
and
be
rendered comprehensible through
metaphors
of
topologies,
networks,
and
flows
that
lead
to
the
constant
evacuation
of
spaces
in
order
to
produce
places
of
communication.

This
mapping impulse
is
hardly new,
but
rather
has
been
part
of
media
all
along.

Visual
media,
for
instance,
developed
out
of
a mapping
impulse
during
the
Renaissance,
which
led
to the
scopic
regimes
of
projectionism
and perspectivalism
and
their
related technologies.

Both
media
and
cartography
are
never
static,
but rather
are
ongoing
scopic
and
discursive
regimes
that
continually
make
and
remake
the
terms
in which we
understand
and
interact
with
our
world.

And
yet,
the
mapping
impulse
of
media
is
both
overt
and
subtle.

Think,
for
instance,
of
the
subtle
duplicity
of
Hollywood’s
runaway
productions,
which
creatively
map Toronto
as ‚“
the
“other“ ”
New York,
Romania
as
North
Carolina,
or
South
Africa
as California.

Developments
in
mobile
computing
have
not
only
increased
the
pace,
flow,
and
interaction
of
media
across
space,
but
also
the
ubiquity, and
thus
the
taken-for-grantedness,
of
mapping.

More
and
more,
owing
to
the
practices
of
the
neogeographers
of the
Geoweb,
media
requires
a
geographical
situatedness
in
which and
for
which media
can
take
place.

Here,
locative
media
relies
on
programming languages
and
APIs
to
construct geo-fencing,
geo-tagging,
and
geo-coding
and
to produce
applications
and
services
that
localize
and individualize
information
to
one’s
liminal,
transitory,
and
fleeting
lived
space.

Consider,
for example,
the
ways
in
which (geo)web
2.0
unites
one’s
virtual
and
physical
presence
(if
such
a distinction
can
be made)
via
services
such
as
FourSquare
or
Facebook
check-ins
that
announce one’s whereabouts
to
friends
and
acquaintances.

With
this
collection
of
papers
we
seek
to
illuminate
media’s
mapping
impulse
by exploring the relationship
between
cartography,
geospatial
technologies,
and
locative
media
on
the
one
hand,
and new
and
traditional
media
forms
such
as
social
media,
mobile
apps,
television,
film,
and
music,
on the
other.

Media’s
Mapping
Impulse
will
be
an
international
and
interdisciplinary
gathering
of
essays
to
be
printed
in
the
acclaimed
Media
Geography
at
Mainz
(MGM)
book
series (www.geo.unimainz.de/mgm).

Possible
themes
and
are as
of
focus
for
this
book include,
but
are
not
limited
to:
montage
and
bricolage;
the
cartographic
paradox
and
cartographic
anxiety;
the
spatial
turn
in
media
studies;
GIS
as
media and
the
use
of
GIS
to
understand
media;
sensorial
cartographies,
sound
and
musical
maps;
cinematic
cartographies;
locative
media,
mobile
apps,
and
the
everyday;
sharing
economies
(AirBnB,
Couch
Surfing,
Uber)
and
the
map;
architectonics,
spatial
mobilities,
haptical and
emotional
cartographies;
urban
planning,
media and
the
revisualization
of
place.

Those
interested
in
participating
should
send
an
extended
abstract
(750-1,000
words),
along
with
a curriculum
vitae
and
contact
information,
to
Laura
Sharp
(laurasharp@email.arizona.edu)
with
the subject
line
““Media’s Mapping
Impulse.”“

We
ask
that
all
proposals
be
submitted
on
or
before December
26th,
2015.

Responses
to
these
proposals
will
be
returned
by
February
1st,
2016.

If selected,
full
papers
will
be
expected
on
or
before
May
1st,
2015.

A
blind
review
will
be
conducted on
all
papers
and
feedback
given
to
authors
at
the
symposium.

All
authors
selected
for
the
final collection
will
be
welcome
to
attend
the
““Media’’s
Mapping
Impulse“ ”
symposium
to
be held
at
the Institute
of
Geography
at
the
Johannes
Gutenberg-University
of
Mainz
in
June
2016.