The Summer School for the Study of Culture, the yearly seminar for doctoral students in the critical humanities and cultural analysis, will in 2018 inspect the contentious realm of cyber, as it performs the fluid and the solid, the evanescence of the cloud and the heavy materiality of technology, the fear of war and the brave world of global information, surveillance and security, the right of inspection and the obfuscation of knowledge. Under the conditions of modernity 4.0, the prefix cyber seems to have become the point of entry for a new narrative of experience. One that draws on a technological unconscious to reboot modes of conviviality, modes of knowledge production, the organization of society, the very definition of democracy, the idea of the human. Coined by mathematician Norbert Wiener, the term cybernetics referred to the science of autonomous machines, that could both adapt their behavior and learn. Cybernetics developed out of a system structured upon coding models. The infrastructure of the new autonomous machines was helpless without the incision, the graphing of the software that would effectively bring them to life.

The Summer School brings together cyber with cipher in order to discuss the manifold incisions that write the machine into life and the strategies that users need to read them back. As Jacques Derrida famously claimed, writing always connotes an element of fracture, of removal from ‘the real’ context. Writing bears the signature of a physical absence – of the subject and of the context – and articulates a moment of rupture, enacted as a counter act or as a mode of dissent under the very act of writing. As our social and cultural experience is being increasingly shaped, written over and redone by the cyber world, it is also here in the utopian drive for perfectioning the human that the hope of resistance before the oblique powers of modernity may lie.

Amongst other theme-related presentations, papers are welcome on the following topics:

• Cyberculture and creativity;
• Cyber mediation and the future of cultural media;
• Citizenship, the public space and the right to privacy;
• Cyberactivism;
• Writing cybernetics: Net literature and the literary network;
• The transformation of the face of war;
• Surveillance and critique;
• Cyberterrorism/cybersecurity and the artistic conviviality;
• Critical thinking in the age of drones;
• Representing cyber.

Speakers:

Maurizio Lazzarato (Matisse/CNRS,University Paris I)
Stefan Kaegi (Rimini protokoll)
Carla Ganito (Universidade Católica Portuguesa)
Frederik Tygstrup (University of Copenhagen)
Marie-Laure Ryan (independent scholar)
Gustavo Cardoso (ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa)
Manuel Portela (Universidade de Coimbra)
Hans-Joachim Backe (University of Copenhagen)
Luís Gustavo Martins (Universidade Católica Portuguesa)

The Summer School will take place at several cultural institutions in Lisbon and will gather outstanding doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers from around the world. In the morning there will be lectures and master classes by invited keynote speakers. In the afternoon there will be paper presentations by doctoral students.

Paper proposals

Proposals should be sent to lxsummerschool@gmail.com no later than February 28, 2018 and include paper title, abstract in English (max. 200 words), name, e-mail address, institutional affiliation and a brief bio (max. 100 words) mentioning ongoing research.

Applicants will be informed of the result of their submissions by March 15, 2018.

Rules for presentation

The organizing committee shall place presenters in small groups according to the research focus of their papers. They are advised to stay in these groups for the duration of the Summer School, so a structured exchange of ideas may be developed to its full potential.

Full papers submission

Presenters are required to send in full papers by May 30, 2018.

The papers will then be circulated amongst the members of each research group and in the slot allotted to each participant (30’), only 10’ may be used for a brief summary of the research piece. The Summer School is a place of networked exchange of ideas and organizers wish to have as much time as possible for a structured discussion between participants. Ideally, in each slot, 10’ will be used for presentation, and 20’ for discussion.

Registration fees

Participants with paper – 265€ for the entire week (includes lectures, master classes, doctoral sessions, lunches and closing dinner)

Participants without paper – 55€ per session/day | 180€ for the entire week

Fee waivers

For The Lisbon Consortium students, there is no registration fee.

For students from Universities affiliated with the European Summer School in Cultural Studies and members of the Excellence Network in Cultural Studies the registration fee is 50€.

Organizing Committee

• Isabel Capeloa Gil
• Peter Hanenberg
• Alexandra Lopes
• Paulo de Campos Pinto
• Diana Gonçalves
• Clara Caldeira
• Rita Bacelar