The Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA) urges Rutgers faculty and graduate students to apply for CCA fellowships for 2008-2009. Rutgers faculty may apply for fellowships in affiliation with the program described below, New Media Literacies, Gutenberg to Google. Faculty may also propose to organize and administer a working group on another topic. Rutgers graduate students should apply for fellowships in connection with New Media Literacies, Gutenberg to Google, but are encouraged to participate in all other programs.

New Media Literacies, Gutenberg to Google

Coordinator:

Meredith McGill

Department of English, Rutgers Universty

meredith.mcgill@rutgers.edu

The Center for Cultural Analysis in 2008-9 invites projects that investigate the history, norms, and consequences of the adoption of new technologies of communication. We seek to understand the contemporary digital media revolution in the context of the long history of media shift from the introduction of movable type to the present, including print, telegraphy, photography, telephony, recorded sound, broadcast radio, film, television, and the internet. We are interested in the social and cultural changes that make media shift possible; the relations of new media to changing conceptions of the public sphere and the nature of citizenship; changing ideas of literacy itself, and the redrawing of the generational, social, and cultural divides that literacy subtends; new media’s effect on cultural production and the alliance of technology and art; tensions between information and entertainment, novelty and obsolescence, individual or group expression and social control, technological innovation and standardization, centralized production and disseminated habits and routines. We are particularly interested in the historical implications of new media for the transmission of knowledge and the role of the university at times of media shift: how have the disciplines been shaped by new media (the preservation of documents, the status of evidence, protocols of authentication) and how might they be transformed by media convergence? Proposals from all fields of study are welcome; we seek to assess the effects of new media in a way that escapes the partial grasp afforded by each of the disciplines. 

Apply for Fellowship (Internal Fellows)