Added: International Conference on New Media, Memories, and Histories

This could be a conference to watch: International Conference on New Media, Memories, and Histories, http://portal.cohass.ntu.edu.sg/NewMedia/. Some of the topic areas look promising.

"Memory studies has emerged as a growing field of research in recent years, attracting scholars from various countries in diverse disciplines. The introduction of the new media has augmented the zeal for memory-making practices in different societies around the world. The Internet and participatory tools of Web 2.0 has contributed to the upsurge in user-generated content. Much of these contents are generated through narratives, stories, pictures and even videos, which also provide a remarkable possibility in fostering and facilitating the production of memories and histories. Furthermore, the Internet’s capability for information storage and sharing has afforded people platforms to impart their recollections of the past. As such, the intersections involving new media, memory and history are attracting academic interest from scholars in Sociology, Geography, History, Communication, Cultural Studies and Information Studies, who are drawing upon various theoretical and methodological approaches in examining the juxtaposition between new media, memories and histories.

In this regard, the conference is conceptualized to gather scholars from different disciplines to deliberate and reflect on key issues, paradigms and research trajectories, as well as to identify possible collaboration opportunities for further investigation on memories and production of historical knowledge in a new media age. Suggested themes for papers in the conference will include (but not limited to):

(1) New media, memory and popular culture
(2) Digitizing memories of wars, trauma and disaster
(3) New media and the production of historical knowledge
(4) Virtual museums and memory
(5) Digital storytelling and memory
(6) Social networking sites and their impact on memories
(7) Nation-building through memories in the digital age
(8) Digital memories and cultural heritagePrimarily, the conference will allow scholars to reflect upon the reciprocal relations of new media, memories and histories, and to probe the distinctions between new media and traditional media environments in enabling remembering and/or forgetting. Through the conference, academics will also interrogate the power dynamics and tensions of the different social actors that construct memory-texts and memory discourses via new media. It is hoped that the conference will serve as a platform in the development and formation of new approaches, methodologies and directions in the study of the interface between new media, memories and histories."