Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

interventions, a careful balance is needed between intention, the apparatus deployed and an assemblage
that forms in response (DeLanda 2006). Drawing on material from my forthcoming book co-authored with
Prof Jane Arthurs (Palgrave, September 2016), I will look at Brand’s 2010 Hollywood swap-shop “Buy Love
Here” and his housing campaigns in East London as case studies.
David Nolan
Making Journalism’s Publics: Historicising Political Assemblages
Although Michael Schudson argues “journalism and democracy are not the same thing”, journalism’s
authority is persistently claimed by reference to its representation of “the public”. This paper considers what
Actor-Network Theory (ANT) adds to historical analyses of the role of journalism in public life. ANT”s most
significant contribution is an approach that treats “publics” as inevitably and irreducibly produced through
assemblages that are constitutive of and a target for political struggle. This shifts away from assessing
“whether or not” journalism is representative of an extant or normative public, to analyse how members
and ideals of “the public” exist as actors within a much wider network of technical, organizational and
political materialities. The significance of this for an historical analysis of journalism is demonstrated by
focusing on how The Guardian claims and materializes “open journalism”, and a consideration of how this
can be situated within the contemporary politics of public-making.
2O
Sexual and gender production and/in the digital (Chair, Alexa Appel)
Amy Shields Dobson
Sexting, intimate and sexual media production, and social justice
Sexting has generated public debate about the risks of using digitally networked mobile devices and social
media for intimate and sexual communication and image production, especially for girls, women, and youth.
The social and cultural value of intimate and sexual media production remains under-emphasised. Following
Couldry and van Dijck’s (2015) call to research social media “as if the social mattered”, I argue that research
and interventions into sexting and intimate and sexual media production more broadly must re-orient
around power and social justice. I position sexting as a set of “media practices” (Couldry, 2012) within
broader digital media cultures of “intimate” and “sexual media” production, arguing that while an
understanding of the agency involved in sexual media production is key (Hasinoff, 2015), there are other
questions that need to be asked to re-orient intimate and sexual media production research. Such a
reorientation is imperative in a techno-social context where intimacy, sexuality, and personal relations have
been rapidly monetized through digital media platforms (Illouz, 2007; Andrejevic, 2011; Skeggs, 2014) in
ways that work to propose a new version of the social (Couldry and van Dijck, 2015).
Anne Harris & Stacy Holman Jones
Transcoding the genderqueer body
Trans* and genderqueer scholarship represents a rhizomatic proliferation of identity performances, ranging
freely across online/offline landscapes. This essay takes as its departure point Lev Manovich’s concept of
transcoding in media ecologies to consider the transcoding of queer bodies in new media. The transcoding of
the genderqueer body is a “body-in-code, a body whose embodiment is increasingly realized in conjunction
with technics” (Hansen, 2006, p. 20). Such transcodings are what Bruno Latour called iconophilic –
representations that emphasize the movement of the image “from one form to another, to the transformation,
and the in-formation of the image itself: the body transcoded by technology” into the digital
human and by art into aesthetic codes (Nayar, 2007, p.4). We extend these considerations into the ways in
which new media not only is changing traditional cultural logics of media in ways that create a composite
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