CFP: On_Culture Issue 14 (Winter 2022) CODES: Power and Subversion

On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture, the biannual, peer-reviewed academic e-journal edited by doctoral researchers, postdocs, and professors working at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus Liebig University Giessen, is seeking contributors for its latest issue. Abstracts are due by February 15, 2022.

The issue will explore the conceptual potentials of codes and the cultural work that codes do in both analog and digital spheres. 

The editors invite scholars from a diverse spectrum of disciplines — from anthropology, linguistics, literature studies, philosophy, cultural sociology, political sciences, law and the arts to information sciences and digital humanities — to contribute to this issue and engage in an interdisciplinary reflection on the concept of code, its limits and potentials.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Encryption and decryption, notions of secrecy
• Intersections of the social and the digital: How does the interaction with codes in the digital shape life outside of the internet?
• Digital and social literacy
• De- and re-coding as culturally subversive acts: code switching as postcolonial gesture, breaking the code
• Questions of representation
• Messages and communication
• Codes and (data) storage techniques
• Codes in law and nation-building (civil code): written and unwritten law, codes as law
• Codes and ethics
• Codes: between visible and invisible
• The performative power of coding
• Codes in popular culture
• Who makes the code? Questions of power, authorship, agency, questions of access, hermeneutic traditions, cultural dynamics, role of cultural convention and social institution
• Translational aspects of codes: Translation of the digital into the analog realm, translation of social principles and norms into the digital
• Codes in the life sciences: the genetic code
• (De-)coding and epistemology
• Gender codes

Those who wish to participate should submit an abstract of 300 words with the article title, 5–6 keywords, a short biographical note, and their email address to [email protected] with the subject line “Abstract Submission.”