Digital Intimacies 4: Porousness & Permutations December 5, 6 & 7, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia Digital Intimacies is now in its fourth year and continues to bring scholars of digital culture together from across Australia and beyond, across disciplines including media and communication, cultural studies, sociology, and gender studies. This year’s symposium is convened by Amy Dobson and Tama Leaver, and is hosted by Curtin University’s Centre for Culture and Technology and the discipline of Internet Studies in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry. As social media open up intimate lives and practices to public and semi-public gazes, we are in the midst of important cultural contestations over the meaning of intimacy. How intimacy plays out in, and in relation to, the digital has become a prominent concern in scholarship of digital cultures, as well as in broader public debate. Intimacy is generally understood as to do with the ‘personal’ and with ‘closeness’ — as describing feelings or relationships that are most ‘inward to one’s personhood’ (McGlotten, 2013). But, as much queer and social theory tells us, intimacy is also socially and culturally constructed and sanctioned, defined by institutions, laws, and social and cultural norms and practices. Norms around various kinds of intimacies and intimate practices involving media increasingly play out online, and via social media platforms. Digital platforms are structured by a ‘like’ economy (Gerlitz and Helmond, 2013), by drives towards the quantification of self (Lupton, 2016), and algorithms, as well as algorithmic ‘imaginaries’ (Bucher, 2018; Carah and Angus 2018). Digital intimacy has been described in this context as a new kind of social capital (Lambert, 2016), as well as new media ‘genre’ (Raun, 2018). Practices of certain kinds of intimacies via the digital are increasingly seen as vital to ‘successful’ and economically productive use of social media, especially for cultural intermediaries and ‘internet celebrities’ (Abidin, 2018). Simultaneously, many forms of intimacy and communication are being encoded, aggregated, analysed and commercialized as forms of big data, provoking difficult and unsettling questions about new forms of surveillance, influence, and control, as well as distinct lack of transparency around new practices and forms of governance, made publicly visible around recent Cambridge Analytica scandals (Andrejevic, 2013; Leaver, 2017). We are calling for paper abstracts on the themes of digital media, digital cultures, and intimacy, with particular interest in porousness and permutations of every kind; that is, papers that map the flow between boundaries – shifts and permeations of practice and understanding towards new forms, new configurations, and the unsettling existing norms in unexpected and as yet unnamed ways. Within these broadly understood boundaries of digital culture(s) and digital intimacies we invite particular exploration of: * how existing structures, boundaries and norms of intimacy are constituted, reconstituted and made porous in terms of identities, practices and platforms; * how practices of intimacy via the digital can be challenged, changed and new permutations emerge in terms of the social, cultural, and political; * how ‘digital disruption’ (of various sorts) shapes, configures, constitutes and impacts intimacy of every kind. The single stream symposium will formally run for two days, December 5 and 6. Following the successful implementation at last year’s symposium, an optional third day for more focused workshopping, writing, and project planning, driven by the intersections made visible during the two conference days, will be available of December 7th for those who wish to participate. Keynote speaker: Professor Jessica Ringrose from University College London; further keynote speaker to be announced soon. Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words to digitalintimacies@gmail.com by June 30, 2018. We will send notifications of acceptances out by the end of July. We are hoping to make this a low-cost event, especially for students, but there will be a small registration fee to cover costs. [Call for Papers] Digital Intimacies 4: Porousness & Permutations Symposium, Dec 5-7 2018, Perth, Western Australia. 300 word abstracts due 30 June 2018, details at https://digint18.tumblr.com/cfp -- Associate Professor Tama Leaver Internet Studies Faculty of Humanities, MCASI, Curtin University GPO Box U1987 Perth WA Australia 6845 Ph: (+61 8) 9266 1258 Email: t.leaver@curtin.edu.au Web: www.tamaleaver.net Twitter: @tamaleaver CRICOS Provider Code: 00301J (WA)