Banff Research in Culture 2014
Summer Research Residency
Program Dates:
May 26, 2014 – June 13, 2014
Application Deadline:
December 2, 2013
Application and Program Info:
http://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/program.aspx?id=1394
Faculty: Lauren Berlant<
http://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/program.aspx?id=1394&facId=4020&p=member>, Francisco Camacho<
http://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/program.aspx?id=1394&facId=4282&p=member>, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun<
http://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/program.aspx?id=1394&facId=4577&p=member>
Intimacy describes our relations with those people, places, creatures,
and things to which we feel the deepest, most powerful or most abiding
connections. The multiple ways in which we experience intimacy today
draw attention to the complex patterning of closeness and distance that
has always unconsciously structured our cultural, social and political
practices. There have long been forms of distant intimacy—staying ‘in
touch’ via the drama of epistolary exchanges or through sound waves
emanating from a telephone—but recent technological developments,
increased travel, the expansion of migration and immigration, and
instantaneous virtual communication are fundamentally reshaping our
understanding and experience of the proximity of bodies, sentiments, and
ideas. Social networking and the democratization of modes of
communication and media have had a profound significance for the
experience of community, collectivity, and affinities; at every level,
from the family to the nation, our sense of belonging is being redefined
in ways that affect our daily experience but remain difficult to
comprehend.
One can see evidence of the new distribution of intimacy everywhere: in
the immediacy of a rock concert, one witnesses people en masse recording
the spectacle for friends not present; on public transit around the
world, passengers make connections to different elsewheres via
newspapers, music, text messages, and mobile phone calls; and in
political protests (as evidenced by the Arab Spring and recent dissent
in Turkey), which have been reshaped by the use of technologies that
are, for a new generation, part and parcel of everyday life. Intimacies
of friendship, collectivity, love and belonging are being substantially
redefined through the devices in our hands and a global infrastructure
that supports instantaneous sharing.
Banff Research in Culture (BRiC) 2014 will investigate the cultural,
social, and political repercussions of “distributed intimacies”—the
processes and outcomes of new forms of mediation that have reshaped how
we relate to one another, imagine ourselves as parts of groups, and
constitute communities. Given the fractal character of our
subjectivity—the ways in which we are necessarily the outcome of
networks of intersubjective relations, experiences, and concepts—how are
our intimacies constituted by the ways we live? What are the modes and
machines by which intimacies are distributed, and what determines their
intensities? How does the global distribution of goods, ideas and
affects across oceans and continents shape forms of intimacy, belonging
and community? What forms of intimacy feel inescapable? What impedes
intimacy from flourishing? Are local scenes and forms of collectivity
(e.g., non-traditional families, polyamory, activist movements,
alternative forms of political practice) enabled by new forms of
distributed intimacies? In what ways do contemporary cultural and art
practices participate in the distribution of intimacy? To what extent
are our intimacies segmented, remote-controlled, and apportioned, and
can we redefine these distributions without lapsing into a nostalgic
primitivism? Finally, what does distributed intimacy imply for social
change as well as for the politics of shaping one’s own self in relation
to others?
We look forward to receiving compelling and original project proposals
from thinkers and creators working on a wide range of projects.
Imre Szeman
Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies
Killam Annual Professor
Professor of English, Film Studies and Sociology
University of Alberta
www.crcculturalstudies.ca<
http://www.crcculturalstudies.ca/>
