[Reader-list] Sarai Reader 08: Fear - Call for contributions

[Monica Narula]

Call for Contributions to Sarai Reader 08 : Fear

I. Introducing the Sarai Reader
II. Concepts and Questions for Sarai Reader 08 : Fear
III. Guidelines for Submissions


I. Introducing the Sarai Reader

Sarai (www.sarai.net), an interdisciplinary research and practice  
programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, invites  
contributions to Sarai Reader 08: Fear.

Previous Readers have included: 'The Public Domain' : Sarai Reader 01,  
2001, 'The Cities of Everyday Life' :  Sarai Reader 02, 2002, 'Shaping  
Technologies' : Sarai Reader 03, 2003, 'Crisis/Media' : Sarai Reader  
04, 2004, 'Bare Acts' : Sarai Reader 05, 2005, ‘Turbulence’: Sarai  
Reader 06', 2006 and 'Frontiers': Sarai Reader 07, 2008.

All the Sarai Readers are available for free download at
http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/

The Sarai Reader series aims at bringing together original,  
thoughtful, critical, reflective, well researched and provocative  
texts and essays and images by writers, scholars, practitioners,  
photographers, artists and activists, grouped under a core theme that  
expresses the interests of Sarai in issues that relate to the media,  
information and society in the contemporary world. The Sarai Readers  
have a wide readership, both in India and internationally.

We also invite proposals to initiate and moderate discussions on the  
themes of the Sarai Reader 08 on the Reader List (http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list 
) with a view to the moderator(s) editing the transcripts of these  
discussions for publication in the Sarai Reader 08.


II. Concepts for Sarai Reader 08: Fear

Modernity’s great promise – the freedom from fear - now lies in ruins.  
One can argue that this vision was always compromised. Modernity  
(especially in the form that emerged in the west, under capitalism)  
always hid its own fears, and hid from its own fears: the fear of  
epidemics, of urban panic, of the homeless multitude and of criminal  
activity. This led to a drive for transparency: of separating the  
civic from the criminal, the civilized and the barbaric peoples, the  
human from the non-human, life and the machine. With the mass  
slaughters of the twentieth century where more died than ever in  
recorded human history, this promise lay shattered. Today, the drive  
for transparency has been rendered doubly difficult, with new mobile  
populations, new networks, and previously unimagined terrors.  
Sovereignty seems an antiquated slogan of the past, and in the wake of  
the financial shocks of 2008, there seems to be some substance in the  
contention that western capitalism has entered a phase of possibly  
long-term decline.

Today's opacity brings with it a new sense of enduring fear. Not  
necessarily the terror of sharp and sudden shocks alone, but of the  
slow mutation of our lives and our times into minefields of  
uncertainty - personal, social and political.

Does anyone any longer trust the weather, the air, the water we drink,  
the food we eat, the blood that courses through us? And who doesn’t  
have misgivings about the experts on prime-time television who talk  
about the trustworthiness of the value of money or the colour of our  
dreams. Everything, from the small talk that lubricates sociality to  
the small print that pads contracts, comes laden with disclaimers.

While the fear of a world war may have somewhat receded, the perils of  
rogue nuclear attacks, of a sudden and lethal outbreak of a virus, of  
flash floods and freak storms, of forest fires and stampedes, of road  
rage and suicide bombers, of turbulence in the economy and accidents  
in the air constitute the counterpoint to the confidence of progress.

The transmission of fear relies as much on the subtle, almost  
epidermal contact between human beings as it does on whispers, rumours  
and panic attacks orchestrated through television and the Internet.  
The effects of these transmissions are visible in a spectrum of  
situations and processes, ranging from unstable sentiments in the  
economy to urban myths about malevolent androids and psychopaths to  
apocalyptic cults to the robust return of the supernatural in popular  
culture in the form of new urban horror genres in cinema, gaming and  
comics. Lacing all this is the salt of terrorism and the so called  
'war on terror’ - the two forces that have done more to generate  
discourses of anxiety on an everyday basis than anything hitherto  
known or imagined. Fear also generates its own industries, which  
stretch from medicine and pharmacology to insurance and engineering  
and architecture to surveillance and security. We use the fear of what  
we know to insure us from the fear of what we do not, or cannot know.  
A careful analysis of risk hedges the frontiers of every dream.

Sarai Reader 08 is interested in these phenomena as cultural  
processes. We want to ask how fear and anxiety shape individual and  
collective dispositions, how lives and social processes are designed  
and invented around or against them, and what effects they have on  
politics, economy and life. We are interested in fear as language, as  
mode of communication, as a way of ordering and rendering the world.  
We are interested in texts that will look at the transmission,  
generation and processing of fear on an industrial scale, that will  
encompass mechanisms designed either to allay or intensify fear or  
ratchet up and down levels of anxiety or the feeling of security.


A broad range of interests could be:

1. The experience of fear as a somatic, epidermal, sensate phenomenon.  
Fear as experienced in confinement and fear in situations of mass  
panic, social hysteria, stampedes, riots etc.

2. The relationship between fear and laughter, between fear and the  
uncanny, between fear and ennui.

3. Anxieties and dangers to do with industrial processes, with  
machines, with automobiles and aircraft and the fear of accidents

4. Fear as political communication, the relationship between fear, the  
discourse of security, terrorism and authoritarianism.

5. The popular culture of paranoia in films, television, advertisement  
and literature.

7. The fear of nature running amok, or the revenge of nature.

8. Fear and foreboding in speculation and economic downturn.

9. The abiding presence of vampires, aliens, ghosts and monsters.

10. How does the design of everything from cities to houses to cars to  
computers account for fear, risk and the chances of damage?

11. The cultivation of risk, danger and fearlessness in extreme  
sports, stunts, financial speculation, bravado and cultures of  
physical and spiritual heroism.

12. The relationship between fear, anger and hatred.

13. Agendas and manifestos, renewing the call for freedom from fear,  
or anticipating things we should worry about.

The form that contributions can take can be varied. We want to invite  
practitioners and others some of whom may be audacious even as others  
may be tentative, wherever in the world they may be located, whether  
they are located in the domains of theory, research, contemporary art,  
media, information and software design, politics or commentary to join  
us in Sarai Reader 08.

You are invited to contribute through essays, dialogues, arguments,  
interviews, photographs, image-text combinations, comics, art-works,  
diary entries, research reports, commentaries and manifestos that can  
evoke responses to an investigation of fear in all its myriad  
dimensions.

We have always viewed the Sarai Reader as hospitable to new and  
unprecedented ideas, as a space of refuge where wayward reflections  
can meet half-forgotten agendas. This is why we see it possible to  
imagine Sarai Reader 08 as setting the stage for a productive  
encounter with the demand for an account of the limits, margins and  
edges of our times.

III. Guidelines for Submissions

Word Limit: 1000 to 3500 words

1. Submissions may be scholarly, journalistic, or literary - or a mix  
of these, in the form of essays, papers, interviews, online  
discussions or diary entries. All submission, unless specifically  
solicited, must be in English only.

2. Submissions must be sent by email in text, as rtf, or as word  
document or open office attachments. Images must be in black and  
white, 300 dpi, and in the tif format.

3.We urge all writers to follow the Chicago Manual of Style, (CMS) in  
terms of footnotes, annotations and references. For more details about  
the CMS and an updated list of Frequently Asked Questions, see http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq/cmosfaq.html

For a 'Quick Reference Guide to the Chicago Manual of Style' -
especially relevant for citation style, see -
http://www.library.wwu.edu/ref/Refhome/chicago.html

4. All contributions must be accompanied by a three/four line text  
introducing the author, including a working email id.

5. All submissions will be read by the editorial collective of the  
Sarai Reader 08 before the final selection is made. The editorial  
collective reserves the right not to publish any material sent to it  
for publication in the Sarai Reader on stylistic or editorial grounds.  
All contributors will be informed of the final decisions of the  
editorial collective vis a vis their contribution.

6. Copyright for all accepted contributions will remain with the  
authors, but Sarai reserves indefinitely the right to place any of the  
material accepted for publication on the public domain in print or  
electronic forms, and on the Internet.

7. Accepted submissions will not be paid for, but authors are  
guaranteed a wide international readership. The Reader will be  
published in print, distributed in India and internationally, and will  
also be uploaded in a pdf form on to the Sarai website. All  
contributors whose work has been accepted for publication will receive  
two copies of the Reader.

IV. Where and When to send your Contributions

Last date for submission of Abstracts by 30th July, 2009.
(A brief outline/abstract, not more than one page, of what you want to  
write about )

Last date of submission of Essays or works by 15th October, 2009.

Expect the reader to be published by February 2010.

Please send in your outlines and abstracts, and images/graphic  
material to -

1. (for articles) to Editorial, Sarai Reader 08
<reader [AT] sarai [DOT] net>

2. (for proposals to moderate online discussions on the Reader List)  
to -
Monica Narula, List Administrator,  the Reader List
<monica [AT] sarai [DOT] net>

3. (for images and/or graphic material) to
Iram Ghufran, Media Lab, Sarai-CSDS
<iram [AT] sarai [DOT] net>


Monica Narula
Raqs Media Collective
Sarai-CSDS
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.sarai.net