Abstracts due August 25th The Digital Intimacies 9 call for papers is now live! The theme for 2023 is "Life Among the Ruins": * "Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes…" (Tsing, 2015, pp. 282).* Digital intimate publics express that the “vibe is off”, a sense that things aren’t quite right as we doom scroll on and on and on. A state of precarity and instability has left ruin and decay in its wake. From failed political systems, burnt-out utopias and bombed out landscapes, to the eerie and empty urban spaces of the mass industrial era, the persistent rubble left from (neo)colonisation and cultures threatened by climate crises, to recently obsolescent technologies, hyperlinks rotting away, and glitchy automated systems. Despite the rubble seeming dead and inert, Anna Tsing (2015) reminds us that ruins are lively places where new multi-species and multi-cultures thrive. From a flattened out, ruined landscape, new possibilities grow. Ruins can be enclaves of hope as much as mourning, loss, and longing: they not only invoke nostalgic reflections, but open up space to dream and imagine the future. Digital intimate publics share the affective experience of life amid the ruin. They are formed in circumstances of something being ‘off’, of being squeezed, constituted from positions of non-dominance. Digital intimacies come to be not in the gleaming corporate towers and cathedrals, but in the messy in-between spaces where resilient, creative practices of ‘making do’ emerge. For Digital Intimacies 9 we ask in what ways are digital intimacies reckoning with the ruined structures they find themselves in? We invite submissions across disciplines to critically engage with, interpret, locate, theorise, or dissect the notion of life amid the ruins in abstract and creative ways. Additionally we encourage applicants to think broadly about the intersections between digital intimate publics and ruins to look with a hopeful eye for what may grow on the edges of our worlds. We welcome papers and presentations in various formats exploring topics including but not restricted to: · Everyday responses to ruin · Tactics and strategies of ‘making do’. · Obsolescent technologies and outdated digital media. · The politics of nostalgia and the future. · Stories, voices and practices from the margins. · Resistance, opposition and subversion in digital spaces. · Community, kinship and care during and after crises. · As well as papers covering broader questions and topics relating to digital intimacies. This year Digital Intimacies 9 is being organised as a joint collaboration between Digital Cultures and Societies at the University of Queensland and the Digital Media Research Centre at QUT. *To submit please email digitalcultures@hass.uq.edu.au <digitalcultures@hass.uq.edu.au> with a 200-300 word abstract and a 1-2 sentence bio by August 25th.* The symposium will be a hybrid event held from the 14th to the 15th of December at QUT Gardens Point campus, Brisbane, Australia (lift access available) and online. For more information check out our website: Digital Intimacies 9 - Call For Papers <https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/digital-intimacies-9/>. If you have any further questions, please feel free to email us at digitalcultures@hass.uq.edu.au. As always, please feel free to forward to any interested colleagues. References: Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press. Cheers, The Digital Intimacies 9 organising crew. -- *ANDREA ALARCON* *+ The Usefulness of Open Events: Navigating Professional Spaces of Urban Meetups <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448211072827>. * *+ Postdoctoral Fellow*+ University of Queensland, | DigitalCultures and Societies <https://hass.uq.edu.au/Digital-Cultures-and-Societies>| Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences + www.andreaalarcon.net <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.andreaalarcon.net__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!pfZjB-VH9nMpcauoej25PsWSibihWGk5GDMsLKJWy_A-yMwoKf71RxldoxH7xJ_VWL9OeDFWcx-_w_81FEUV4Q$> | @a2sojet <https://twitter.com/a2sojet?lang=en>