Proposal Deadline: Digital Cultures Collaboratory 2027 Spring Symposium
Call for Proposals – Digital Action: Temporality & Community
- DEADLINE: January 31, 2027, 11:59 PM
- Symposium dates: April 16 – 17, 2027
Symposium Theme
This year, the Center for 21st Century Studies aims to activate “Slow Action” – a contextually sensitive paradigm that resists efficiency in favor of collective engagement and durable communities. In line with this theme, the Digital Cultures Collaboratory is pleased to announce the 5th event in its annual online symposium series, organized around the theme of “Digital Action: Temporality & Community.”
In light of the maturation and normalization of digital technologies, digital spaces have emerged as legitimate and consequential sites for community formation, participation and collective action. Moreover, these platforms simplify and facilitate forms of interaction that are otherwise difficult to establish or sustain through traditional modalities. Unique facets of these interactions include anonymous participation, connections among geographical disparate individuals, and engagement among people whose identities, interests or experiences place them at the margins of dominant social structures.
However, in some cases the relationships between these communities and the platforms that facilitate their engagement are not always mutually beneficial. In many cases, the hierarchical power structure which emerges from the owner-user model present in a platform society is intrinsically adversarial by design. Thus, the digital conditions under which communities form and organize are directly shaped by privately governed infrastructures, terms of service, and content moderation practices that may be in direct conflict with the interests of the communities that they sustain. Navigating these conditions in a digital ecosystem requires more than technical proficiency – demanding critical engagement with policies, power structures, and information environments that ultimately mediate the participation in digital spaces.
Our interactions within and across digital spaces also leave space for the in-between. Community can manifest within micro-interactions; social actions, platform structures, and asynchronous modes of being can have unintended consequences that can result in alternative, and ambiguous, constructions of virtual relationships. The meaning and reality of agency becomes fluid and transmutable when we dive into these sites of unarticulated possibility.
Symposium Details
The Digital Cultures Collaboratory (DCC) is an interdisciplinary research collaborative at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that brings together graduate students with common interests across emerging fields of digital studies.
The DCC’s annual online symposium is a semi-formal environment for graduate students, as well as early career researchers, to present and develop concepts close to their areas of interest. We invite scholars in digital media and other interrelated disciplines to participate in 15-minute presentations hosted online via Zoom, simulcast to Twitch, and archived on YouTube.
The symposium will be held over two days (April 16th and 17th, 2027). Abstracts of around 500 words, as well as a short biography of the presenter(s), should be submitted via: Digital Action: Temporality & Community – CFP Form before January 31st, 2027 by 11:59PM CST. Submitters will be notified of the status of their proposals by February 28th, 2027.
Suggested Themes
- Community & Collective Action
- Digital Temporalities
- Duration, rhythms, and interruptions
- Slowness, play and alternative temporalities
- Digital Memory & Materiality
- Community archives and digital remnants
- Media archaeology, deep time, and obsolescence
- Information & Governance
- Information literacy, policy, and platform governance
- Organization and representational politics
- Access, visibility, and community autonomy
About the UWM Digital Cultures Collaboratory
The UWM Digital Cultures Collaboratory (DCC) is an interdisciplinary research collaborative that has several pursuits, most of which revolve around the convergence of streaming technologies and games. The Collaboratory receives generous support by the Center for 21st Century Studies, a research institution at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee that has been at the forefront of critical theory, the humanities, and technology for over fifty years.
The Collaboratory supports staff, faculty, and graduate students who investigate social play of digital and analog games, live streaming, and other aspects of computational and procedural culture. DCC ventures are guided by five commitments, aligned with and extending the priorities of the Center: critical orientation, multidisciplinary methods, empirical approach, public orientation, and a view beyond the “digital.” Read DCC’s full mission statement.
Jan 31, 2027 @ 11:59 pm