Comment

Comment by Tatomir Toroman on September 29, 2012 at 9:25pm

Reading a lot of media related articles I'm surprised how little is Baudrillard relevant for media anthropology? Why? I'm really interested in what he would say about Facebook... anyway, greetings to all :-)

Comment by Julia Yezbick on January 8, 2012 at 3:43am

a journal for experiments in critical media practice

Sensate is a peer-reviewed, graduate-student-run journal for experiments in critical media practice. It aims to create, present, and critique innovative projects in the arts, humanities, and sciences  and to build on the groundswell of pioneering activities in the digital humanities, scholarly publishing, and innovative media practice to provide a forum for scholarly and artistic experiments not conducive to the printed page.

Sensate is currently accepting:
1. Submissions for publication (Due: February 8, 2012)
2. Applications (Due: February 1, 2012)

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1. Call for Submissions:

Exploring new ways to archive, curate, and organize academic multimedia scholarship, Sensate invites submissions of scholarship and art whose work is not conducive to the printed page. We experience the world through many forms and modes of mediation. Sensate seeks to acknowledge these various forms and assert a place for scholarship that engages the viewer/reader/listener on multisensorial and multimodal levels. We encourage submissions that creatively bridge research and media-based work, and aim at going beyond an illustrative relation between text and image towards both solid and innovative modes of scholarship and artistic practice. 

The integration of form and content is crucial to our mission and thus rather than a list of guiding questions we would like to offer a list of possible approaches that demonstrate efforts to unite form and content and to provoke inquiry through creative combinations of exposition and expression.

We are currently seeking work in any of the following categories/disciplines: artistic research, research as sensorial practice, visual anthropology, sensory ethnography, digital humanities, sound studies, multimedia mash-ups, media archeology, digital collections of audio and/or visual materials, digital cartography, performance and its documentation, and critically-inflected art in all media. Thematically, we are especially interested in the humanities and social sciences, but welcome projects in the sciences that entail similar approaches. 

The above guides are not meant to be proscriptive, and we welcome submissions that extend beyond these possibilities. Queries about possible article content as well as submissions from graduate students are also encouraged.

Submissions are due by February 8, 2012 at which time the editors will make initial decisions. Please use the Chicago Manual of Style for all citations.

Submit via our online submissions form.
Contact us with any questions.


2. Call for Applications:
Sensate is currently accepting applications to be a part of our team in three core areas: Web Design and Development, Editor/Producer, and Media and Outreach. Deadline for applications is February 1st. We are open to applications from individuals based outside of the Boston/Cambridge area. Complete job descriptions can be found on our website.

Submit via our online application form.
Contact us with any questions.

Comment by John McCreery on May 29, 2011 at 6:12pm

Hello Tatomir. Please be warned, my participation will be intermittent until Verizon installs the Internet connection at my daughter's new home in Fairfax, VA, USA. The installation is scheduled for June 2. In the meantime, allow me to recommend Brian Moeran, ed., (2000) Asian Media Productions. Transparency warning: This collection includes an article on producing advertising in Japan by yours truly. In it you will find, however, a fair assortment of work by anthropologists who have worked on various media-related topics in India, Southeast Asia, China and Japan. That was, of course, more than a decade ago, and a lot has happened since; but it might be an interesting place to start.

Comment by Tatomir Toroman on May 29, 2011 at 12:26pm

Hello Francine and John. I agree that the anthropological approach, methods, experiences and reflectivity could contribute to a better understanding of the media. This is definitely a complex subject that cannot be extracted out and studied as a separate phenomenon. I worked as a journalist, so one of the things that interests me very much is "making news process". In my opinion it is impossible to separate from business and power relations and it is highly context sensitive. Construction of ideology of objectivity on global/local level is very interesting question for me. How "news" affects people and how they deal with them, local responses to global events, talks about particular news and identity - these are interesting questions. Also the question of representation is still important to me (Including self-representation on Facebook :-)) Do you recommend some good example of media anthropology for reading?

Comment by John McCreery on May 28, 2011 at 9:22pm

Would it help if we talked a bit about the scope and focus of media anthropology? If I read Francine correctly, she works in an area that might br labeled media and everyday life, seeing interactions with media as a natural extension of ethnographic description. In my own work on the world of Japanese advertising creatives, I see media from a different angle, as financial and material constraints on the composition of creative teams and the different types of work they produce. I have met other anthropologists whose focus is journalism and how newsrooms work.tatomir, what is your angle on media?

Comment by Francine Barone on May 27, 2011 at 7:38pm

Well, for my fieldwork, I did spend a lot of time online (Facebook and other social media, etc), but the main focus of my research was done living in a small city and getting to know how new technologies and digital media have affected or changed the lives of people "on the ground", not just on the web. Media anthropology is a really diverse field and it benefits from the already varied and complicated research methods that anthropologists can bring. When we think of media in our everyday lives, we can easily take it for granted, so that makes it all the more complex and interwoven an area to try and grasp for ethnographic research. The internet and mobile technologies are so pervasive, its surprising that any current fieldwork could possibly avoid the subject.

Comment by Tatomir Toroman on May 27, 2011 at 6:15pm

Maybe we need scandalous photos and the latest gossip about celebrities? :-)So, maybe people think that this is an area that belongs to and which is already well developed in Media Studies, Cultural Studies and Sociology. And for most of us media are there all the time, they are part of everyday life. Where is the field for fieldwork? Watch TV? Surfing the Internet? Share photos with Iphone? Hang out with reporters in a bar?

Comment by Francine Barone on May 26, 2011 at 4:12pm

Perhaps not enough people are aware of media anthropology and/or this group. Also, some aspects of media/digital/virtual anthropology have been spread around the site in other places, like e-seminars and other groups. The topic most certainly isn't boring, so how best to let others in on the fun?

Comment by Tatomir Toroman on May 25, 2011 at 11:00am

Only 0.28% of the OAC members (14 of 4936) have interest in media anthropology?

What do you think why? Is this topic really that boring?

Comment by Julia Yezbick on April 26, 2011 at 3:41pm

New journal from Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab and the new metaLAB@Harvard:

Sensate is an online, media-based journal for the creation, presentation, and critique of innovative projects in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Our aim is to build on the current groundswell of pioneering activities in the digital humanities, scholarly publishing, and innovative media practice to integrate new modes of scholarship into the cognitive life of the academy and beyond.

Sensate aims to foster new forms of scholarship that expand the traditional paradigm of academic discourse and open new possibilities for scholarship and artistic creation. Fundamental to this expansion is reimagining what constitutes a ‘piece’ of scholarship or art. Work featured in Sensate might take the form of audiovisual ethnographic research, multimedia mash-ups, experiments in media archaeology, participatory media projects, or digitized collections of archival media, artifacts, maps, or objects. By highlighting the processes of media and knowledge production, we hope to foster emergent and generative scholarship.

We hope that you will find many ways to engage with not only the content, but the ever-expanding network of Sensate collaborators. We welcome any feedback, provocations, and invitations for collaboration. Please contact us at: info@sensatejournal.com.

Sensate is free and open-access. Please visit the site at:http://www.sensatejournal.com/.