Streetnotes

CFP: Photo Essay, special issue Streetnotes 22

Deadline: October 15, 2013

Streetnotes: poetry, ethnography, and the documentary experience.

http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

Photo Essay

In this special issue of Streetnotes we wish to examine the concept of the Photo Essay, to engage, question, experiment, and reinvent it, as a means to capture the character of the contemporary moment.

Born alongside the camera, the Photo Essay took shape as a challenge to hitch together image and thought.  Maneuvering between two modes of writing, with light and with words, the creators of the Photo Essay set in motion modern genres, such as photojournalism and documentary, and initiated new disciplines like visual anthropology and sociology. Offering the promise of new insight and new truths, the exposé of the Photo Essay helped create new media platforms and new audiences too. The best work also provoked a new critical awareness of social conditions and new questions about their representation.

Along the way, however, the Photo Essay became less transparent and more freighted with the problems of late modernity. Questions arose about the form’s authenticity and objectivity. Critics and artists saw in it a hardening of style, and the emergence of a privileged gaze and compositional authority that was less conducive to disrupting and demystifying power than to maintaining its structures. Perhaps against its original intentions, the Photo Essay became a device that distanced viewers from events. 

The fall of the Photo Essay, its turn from truth to deception, however, took place alongside the popularization of both photography and ethnography. New technology and media enabled both an explosion and acceleration of images and texts across an omnipresent mediascape, one which is today increasingly dominated by so-called ‘user-generated content.’ In this issue of Streetnotes, we ask if at-hand tools to capture images, instantly upload videos, and issue short-burst communiques have further buried the Photo Essay as form. Or instead, have these advances made the very challenges the Photo Essay calls forth, all the more important to take up?

There is no way to go back to re-create nor re-read a Photo Essay like Bateson and Mead’s _Balinese Character_ or W. Eugene Smith ‘Country Doctor’ as if the crisis of representation never happened, or as if the means of digital production had not significantly changed. Streetnotes asks, instead, if the impossibility of the Photo Essay today has not, in fact, made the questions implicit in its form all the more critical as we attempt to make sense of the flood of images and texts which today everywhere surround us.

We endeavor to think and experiment with the Photo Essay of tomorrow. To ask what must be destroyed and what must be rescued? What is the Photo Essay’s unique craft, art or invitation? What kind of audience can it evoke today?

In this issue of Streetnotes we are looking for:

New Photo Essays, which experiment and play with its form.

Academic articles on the place of the Photo Essay within today’s mediascape.

Critical reviews of contemporary work that aims to bring photography and texts together in a sustained and complex fashion.

And any other inventive work that struggles with the challenges associated with the interplay and poetics of images and thought, or pictures and words.   

Questions and topics related to the Photo Essay may include (but are not limited to the following):

The heuristic character of essays and photography

The poetics of concealment and exposition

The dialectics of image and texts

The End and/or Ends of photojournalism

The Photo Essay within the context of new media

The politics of the Photo Essay

Radical images and the onset of concrete social conditions

Capturing and appropriating space

Reimagination of social relations

Images of the global, placemaking and travel

Fast media and slow Interpretation

Image vs. Text, Eye vs. Ear

Im/possibilities of seeing differently

The Work, craft and art of photography and writing today

New advances in descriptive poetics

Deadline: October 15, 2013

Please direct questions to Streetnotes Editor, David Michalski michalski@ucdavis.edu

All articles must be submitted through Streetnotes submission management software:

http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

About Streetnotes:

Streetnotes is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal publishing qualitative sociology, critical essays, documentary photography, poetry and visual arts informed by the ethnographic exploration of contemporary and historic urban forms.

Our name, Streetnotes is a turn on the word ‘fieldnotes’, as such our journal seeks methodological innovation and critical engagement through works which lay bare the poetics of discovery, display and analysis of street observations. Towards this end we publish work of seasoned and aspiring scholars, social scientists, artists, photographers and poets engaged in creative ways of making sense of, and questioning the familiar and strange of urban life in the effort to build empirically based social theory.

To nurture the humanistic exploration of the city as a social form, Streetnotes seeks to develop through its publications a popular ethnographic tradition, one that encourages the mass reflection and critical grasp of the concrete matrix of urban social life.

More information about submission policies are located at the journal site:

http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

Questions can be directed to the Editor, David Michalski  michalski@ucdavis.edu.

Call for Papers

Streetnotes 20

FASHIONING THE GLOBAL CITY

Guest Edited by Claudia Brazzale, Ph. D.
Institute for Research on Women
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

NEW Deadline February 1, 2012

“Fashioning the Global City” turns the focus of Streetnotes on the relationship between cities and fashion to explore how the cultural and material production of style informs and performs urban lives and places.

The fashion industry has historically drawn on the metropolis and its association with modernity to stir fascination and desire for novelty and change. Cities spatialize, ground, and give meaning to fashion by providing both its imagery and its physical and social context. Today cities are even more central to an increasingly global fashion system, serving as both sites of legitimation and concrete places from which to construct representations of urbanity.

If the dynamism of cities has long been recognized as a source of contemporary style, less attention is paid to how the fashion industry/system has come to redefine the modern metropolis through its commodification, manufacturing, and circulation of urban style. We are interested in exploring how fashion remaps the cultural topography of cities and how urban culture feeds fashion’s cosmopolitan imagination.

We question how fashion comes to shape the urban landscape of global cities with its posters, ads, shows, and designer boutiques. What are the consequences of flagship stores in metropolises around the world? How do they serve as the fortified outposts of brands simultaneously promoting labels in key cosmopolitan centers while absorbing their urban edge? As Prada in New York (designed by Rem Koolhaas) and Romanticism3 in Hangzhou (designed by Sako Architects) produce spectacular and experiential environments that have become tourist destinations on their own right, we question fashion’s role in urban renewal.

In this issue, we aim to explore how “street culture” intersects with fashion culture and industry, and examine how the implication these intersections perform contemporary urbanity. We ask how fashion systems transform images of historically marginalized communities such as the “hood” or “ghetto” into market trends? How are such communities constructed as sources of cosmopolitan fashion-style? And how is fashion, and the image of the metropolis transformed by such imagery?

We seek contributions which consider what contemporary fashion can tell us about the character of new metropolises and the dynamics of globalization? How do cities become stylish, and in turn, what of the urban is lost through the filter of commodified style? What kind of new geographical and urban configurations arise from the link between fashion culture and global cities? And, finally, what are the gender, class, race, and sexual politics of these new geographical and fashion configurations?

We invite scholarly essays, photography, descriptive poetry, and documentary analysis that explores the powerful relationships between fashion, cities, and urban culture as well those which address the role of fashion in shaping ideas of global urbanity and citizenship. We ask contributors to consider the ways in which these relationships are mediated and negotiated by the concrete conditions of production, local and intimate desires, and the processes of globalization.


Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Cities, urban lifestyles, subcultures, and fashion trends: Fashioning cities versus fashion’s manufacturing of the urban.

• Urban fusion in fashion and the role of dress in connecting the urban life-styles of different countries; especially in the appropriation of marginal urban spaces (the hood, the ghetto, the barrio, and the favela).

• The ways in which fashion contributes, interferes with, or negates the urban imaginary as it travels across global cities. How does fashion extend and subvert urbanity?

• The class, gender, race, and sexual politics that the conjunction of global cities and fashion performs, enacts, or enables. What kinds of omissions are necessary to fashion global cities and urbanize fashion?

• The reproduction the metropolitan experience. How does fashion culture performs the sights and sound of urban life in its communication?

• The role of new outlets of brands as shopping destinations and how such outlets imagine and reconstruct the city.

• The particular life-styles, bodies, and environments that brands like “Urban Outfitters,” “Abercrombie and Fitch,” and “Hollister” sell. How do beach cultures or rural lifeworlds meet and shape city culture?

• The connection between fashion, art, and cities. How do museums’ retrospective shows of fashion designers, such as the recent Alexander McQueen’s retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, serve and impact cities?

• The role of globalization and the links between fashion capitals, garment supply chains, and centers of production, consumption, and branding.

Submission deadline February 1, 2012

Papers should be submitted through the Streetnotes site at: http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

Inquires and questions about topics can be addresses to special issue editor,
Claudia Brazzale
clabrazz@rci.rutgers.edu

or

David Michalski, Editor
Streetnotes
University of California, Davis
michalski@ucdavis.edu

CFP: Urban Culture Area, MAPACA, 11/3-11/5/2011, Philadelphia, PA (June
15th, 2011, deadline for proposals)

As natural and man-made disasters continue to physically eradicate people and places around the world, questions of destruction, perseverance, resistance, and rebirth ring louder than ever. Can the city make it in such challenging times? Can citizens make it in such challenging times? And at what price, and to what end? Simultaneously, companies compete to release their latest technological wonders: Ipads, Blackberries, Smart Boards, Double-decker planes…wonders that eradicate physical distances. We are all LinkedIn and friended by countless others on Facebook. Does it not matter where and how we live physically anymore because of our addiction to the non-place of virtual existence? This year, we want to pay attention to what happens post-city, when the city is gone or no longer matters, due to both physical disasters and technological inventions. Now, more than ever, we wonder, what is a city? How and why does a city come to be, continue to be, and cease to be? And what happens to the urban self, in the face of economic, geographic, social, technological change? As in previous years, please send your proposals about these and related issues to the Urban Culture Area of MAPACA. Historical or ethnographic studies of public sites and events, poetic accounts of personal geographies through cities, and explorations of highly orchestrated or surprisingly improvised events in designated areas in the city are welcome, as are studies of particular cities. If interested in participating in a workshop on “writing the urban,” in addition to presenting a paper, please, indicate so. June 15th, 2011 is the deadline by which you can send your virus free proposals and short recent bios to Dr. Blagovesta Momchedjikova, bmm202@nyu.edu. This year, the Mid-Atlantic Popular Culture/American Culture Association meets from November 3rd till November 5th, 2011, in Philadelphia, PA. For further information, check www.mapaca.net.

STREETNOTES marks its debut at University of California’s eScholarship with the publication of a special issue called “New Europes” edited by Adam Siegel. This issue includes work by John Fekner and Don Leicht, Gabriela Coman, Vad Erent, Jennifer Long, Patricia Ranzoni, Jerry Krase, Eliane Bots, Octavian Esanu, Nella Young Joseph Heathcott, Pamela Gesualdi, Petra Ganglbauer, and Petra Johanna Sturm and Günter Vallaster, with an re-introduction to the Streetnotes project by editor, David Michalski.

Streetnotes is a peer-reviewed open access journal dedicated to the humanistic exploration of the city as a social form.

Information about contributing to Streetnotes is located at the journal site

http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

Streetnotes

Seeks qualitative sociology, critical essays, documentary photography, poetry and visual arts informed by the ethnographic exploration of contemporary and historic urban forms.

Our name, Streetnotes is a turn on the word ‘fieldnotes’, as such our journal seeks methodological innovation and critical engagement through works which lay bare the poetics of discovery, display and analysis of street observations. Towards this end we publish work of seasoned and aspiring scholars, social scientists, artists, photographers and poets engaged in creative ways of making sense of, and questioning the familiar and strange of urban life in the effort to build empirically based social theory.

To nurture the humanistic exploration of the city as a social form, Streetnotes seeks to develop through its publications a popular ethnographic tradition, one that encourages the mass reflection and critical grasp of the concrete matrix of urban social life.

More information about submission policies are located at the journal site

http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

Questions about submissions and inquiries about potential work (such as multi-media projects) that may complicate these guidelines can be directed to the Editor, David Michalski  michalski@ucdavis.edu.

All submissions must also be made through the “ Submit Article” link.