CALL FOR PAPERS
Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing and Cultural Rhetoric
Special Issue on
Video and Participatory Culture
Guest Editors
Geoffrey V. Carter,
Sarah J. Arroyo,
Advances in portable, digital technology bring video circulation into the mix of rhetorical methods. Nowhere is the ubiquity of digital participation more evident than in the eruption of videos on YouTube and other social networking sites. According to Henry Jenkins, the rise of digital technology is challenging our traditional notions of creation, curation, and community. YouTube, for example, is more than just an archive of individual home movies; it is also a medium that mobilizes a diverse range of video production methods that operate alongside a diverse range of cultural resources. Jenkins explains:
YouTube represents the kind of hybrid media space described by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks—a space where commercial, amateur, nonprofit, governmental, educational, and activist content co-exists and interacts in ever more complex ways. As such, it potentially represents a site of conflict and renegotiation between different forms of power.
This conflict of power is a rich site for rhetorical innovation and should allow contributors to take up some of the most pressing rhetorical, social, political, aesthetic, technological, pedagogical, and legal issues spawned in our emerging participatory culture. We envision this special issue as a resource that is both practical and theoretically complex, where video production is connected to participatory exploration, and we invite contributors to offer both hermeneutic (analytical, interpretive) and heuretic (inventive) essays. Given Enculturation’s online format, we also encourage the production of (and links to) videos posted online or embed in articles.
On his blog “Confessions of an Aca-Fan,” Jenkins offers a series of propositions for a participatory theory of YouTube:
Following his lead, we suggest a number of areas contributors may address and questions they may answer:
- Pedagogical Perspectives: What roles does video production play in the classroom and how might sites like YouTube be utilized in the university?
- Methodological Perspectives: There is a “grassroots” appeal to handheld video. What aesthetic methods exist for producing “authentic” video?
- Community Perspectives: How have various groups utilized various styles of video production to generate new emergent cultures?
- Archival Perspectives: Video production is now easily circulated and does not rely on one site. What are the long-term consequences of viral videos?
- Political Perspectives: The ease of video production sometimes fosters greater civic engagement. What social and political groups have recently emerged?
- Legal Perspectives: The gift economy of participatory culture is often at odds with commodity relations of user-generated content. How do issues of copyright, fair use, and artistic remixing figure into video and participatory culture?
- Technological Perspectives: What equipment makes such widespread participation possible and what is the future evolutionary trajectory of this technology?
- Generational Perspectives: A participation gap is currently opening and that means there are new social skills emerging from this technology. How do different age groups treat the possibilities of video differently?
- Race/Gender Perspectives: Who has access to the technology, and how do issues like race and gender influence the type of participation a given culture has with regards to video production?
We would like to gather 1,000 word proposals by
Please send correspondence and proposals (as rtf attachments) to:
Geoffrey Carter, gvcarter@svsu.edu
Sarah J. Arroyo, sarroyo@csulb.edu