Everyday 3D Lives: Digital Embodiment, Performativity and Globalization

DEADLINE EXTENDED:

PLEASE SUBMIT ABSTRACTS BY DECEMBER 1, 2007.

Title: Everyday 3D Lives: Digital Embodiment, Performativity and Globalization

Editor : Radhika Gajjala

[ http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik ]

In the recent past, there has been much talk of “web 2.0 “ and “web 3D” as new media. Educators and researchers all over the world are debating the pros and cons of such environments. MMORPGs (Massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing games) such as World of Warcraft (WoW) and online 3D environments for social and economic activity. Immersive environments such as secondlife are being examined from multiple disciplinary lenses. This edited will include articles based in examinations of embodiment, performativity, gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and globalization critically, and will be open to multiple disciplinary intersections.

What sorts of convergences, conjunctures and connections emerge in relation to embodiment, identity and globalization specifically in 3D environment (such as secondlife) and MMORPGs? Researchers examining presence and absence or voice and voicelessness are increasingly mobilized to speak of identities emerging online, while binaries such as embodied/disembodied and global/local are deployed unproblematically in both utopian and dystopian viewpoints regarding the Internet. Performativity begins to shape exposure and privacy. Thus while claims are being made that the Internet is a “public sphere” in a Habermasian sense (Poster 1995) corporate privation and surveillance comes upon us in Internet mediated environments and we learn to negotiate our speaking within interstices of presences and absences, cooperation and isolation, community engagement and individual consumerism. Simultaneously hegemonic structures invested in particular ideologies of globalization and “free” markets learn to co-opt diverse identities and voices. Voice thus becomes a strategic construct in both cases. Notions of voice/voiceless and empowerment/participation in such instances are appropriated by status quo discourses and are themselves mobilized for the oppression of the subaltern (Gajjala, forthcoming 2008).

In the book on “Pedagogies of the Global”, the editor, Arif Dirlik writes that

“Rather than erase difference by converting all to Euro/American norms of modernity, however, capitalist modernity, as it has gone global, has empowered societies once theoretically condemned to premodernity or tradition to make their own claims on modernity on the basis of those very tradition to make their own claims on modernity on the basis of those very traditions, as filtered through experiences of colonialism, neocolonialism, or simple marginalization by the forces of globalization “(Dirlik, 2006, 3).

Digital media plays a significant role in aiding these connections and shaping these re-presentations. I am interested in research that examines these connections, representations and productions through critical theoretical lenses based in postcolonial theories, feminist theories, critical race theories and so on.

500 word abstracts due by December 1, 2007 and full articles of no more than 8000 words length due by September 2008.

Email me with any queries – radhika@cyberdiva.org.