[dis/em/re/mis] PLACE [ment]
Welcome to the third season of the Urban Humanities Initative’s Digital Salon, an academic podcast which explores urban humanities through a critical use of sound. Our theme for this new season is [dis/em/re/mis] PLACE [ment]. In keeping with this theme, we are looking for submissions that engage with the following questions:
- In an era full of increasing insecurities driven by anthropogenic climate change and late-stage capitalism, how is our understanding of places changing?
- How are borders moving and transforming?
- Who and what are being replaced at the level of the human, the plant, the mineral and how are these new divides reshaping the city?
- How is city planning shifting and how do we decide what to remember and forget in these cities?
Some key terms that are connected to our theme are displacement, emplacement, replacement, misplacement as well as dissociation, regeneration, reappropriation, remembrance, and removal. We ask that podcasts be grounded in a place, whether that be material, ephemeral, or both.
These podcasts can investigate elements of memory, heritage, tradition, preservation, restitution, belonging, alienation, reimagination, regeneration, recapture, reappropriation, and/or joy across borders—borders between the human and natural world, the physical and metaphysical, the present and the past, the built environment and the experienced environment, and borders between languages, cultures, and places just to name a few.
This season, we will be inaugurating a peer review process for all podcasts, which we hope will benefit both our peer reviewers and our contributors. There will be six peer reviewers from varied urban humanities communities (academia, arts, and planning), who will provide rich and nuanced feedback for each contributor. Each contributor will be required to submit an initial proposal and two subsequent drafts to peer reviewers (two reviewers will review each step of this process). We ask that you envision your podcast episode to be 20-30 minutes in length. To help accompany our contributors, the editorial board will run two podcast workshops: one on narrative and one on sound planned for March of 2023. Completed podcasts will be expected by the end of May, 2023. Season 3 will be released in June 2023.
If you are interested in submitting to the podcast, please send your application to the Digital Salon Editorial Board at ucladigitalsalon@gmail.com by January 31st. Your submission should include:
- A 1 page single-spaced abstract about your vision for your 20-30 minute podcast that will be completed by the end of May, 2023 that focuses on the themes of Digital Salon’s 3rd season.
- EITHER a 2 minute demo OR a storyboard of your intended podcast. Your storyboard or demo should communicate a proposed structure for your podcast, what kinds of sound recordings you will be using, how you will balance narrative and experimental forms, and anything else that will give us a sense of your plans for the final podcast. We suggest Audacity, Soundation, or GarageBand for a demo and Miro for storyboarding software.
Collectively, these components should demonstrate:
a. You have a clear vision for your podcast.
b. You will be able to execute the podcast.
c. Your podcast will fit the thematic, theoretical, and methodological criteria we have outlined above.
We look forward to collaborating with you!
Sincerely,
Digital Salon Season 3 Editorial Board
Olivia Arena (Master’s Student in Urban Planning)
Danielle Hanzalik (Ph.D Student in French and Francophone Studies)
Rebecca Smith (Ph.D Student in Comparative Literature)
Doğa Tekin (Ph.D Student in Linguistic Anthropology)