17 Jan Special Topic: ON THE PEDAGOGY OF THE VIDEO-FLANEUR

Call for Papers 2022 Special Topic (VJEP)

Topic: ON THE PEDAGOGY OF THE VIDEO-FLANEUR

Guest Editors:

Joff P.N. Bradley, Teikyo University, Tokyo, Japan

Masayuki Iwase, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

As we are slowly emerging out of the coronavirus pandemic, the task which beholds users (educators/teachers, researchers, artists, videographers/filmmakers, etc.) is to find ways to explore the world outside our sedentary abodes. One way to do this is to think about the idea of a kinetic, digital psychogeography, by exploring the activity of dérive or drifting (Debord, 1958; Certeau et al, 1998). Our intention is to tie together the concepts of post-media (Guattari, 1995) and ecosophy (Guattari, 2005) with the question of desire, the role of unconscious, and the notion of embodied phenomenological drifting. Through dérive or wandering, we are interested in how we might use media technologies, such as video, not to curate or guide users per se, but to allow them to wander freely in their local milieu. To go walkabout. Through drifting and dérive, through practices of spatial and temporal exploration and visualization, we shall extrapolate from psychogeographical practices new or emergent pedagogical practices. Concretely this will be done through forms of mnemotechnics, through the externalisation of memory as prostheses – recording video screens, snapping photographs, recording sounds, or using GPS. The goal is to record affective responses to phatic, socially constructed mnemonic technologies and the affective disruptive and disrupted environment in which we are immersed (Massumi, 2002, 2015). More simply, we are interested in the passage through often unknown invisible spaces and what impersonal affects manifest in due course. In this play of dislocation-relocation, media technologies here are used therapeutically, pharmacologically and curatively (Bradley, 2021). Here ecosophy promotes the logic of the flux, as a creative form of wayfaring.

The purpose of this collective project is for users to effectively re-connect with their local environment within and beyond urban spaces including rural communities and natural habitat using video technologies. We are keen to use the educational teachings of Ferdinand Deligny and his study of wandering lines and the notion of the flâneur – flana to wander with no purpose – in Baudelaire to curate this project. We want to explore how users navigate the city, rural communities, and natural habitat in which they are immersed, not to explore that part of these spaces which they are most familiar with, but to explore those parts of these spaces which are seldom parts of one’s everyday purview, that is those spaces one never dreams of venturing to. What is of interest is the disruption or the détournement (the rerouting or hijacking) of perception through an errant trajectory. What is important is the disorientation of users and the affective response to unfamiliar encounters and feelings. This is to somehow connect them via video technologies to the local milieu of urban, rural, and natural spaces and to care about them in the context of the Anthropocene. This form of experimental schizoanalytic pedagogy is thus at heart an interrogation of kinetic, impersonal affects and the exploration of not only the solitary unconscious but what we might call the “collective algorithmic unconscious”. This affective topography of the digital era – an algorithmic psychogeography or algorithmic derive – will allow users to explore emotions and mnemotechnics in the very experience of walking in the world (transgressing, deviating, transversally cutting, reimagining) in the time of the corona pandemic.

Bibliography

Asada Akira. (1984). Tōsō-ron: Sukizo kizzu no bōken. Chikumashobō.

Biesta, G. and Cowell, G. (2012) ‘How is community done? Understanding civic learning through psychogeographic mapping’, International Journal of Lifelong Education, 31, 1, pp. 47–61

Bradley, J. P. N. (2021). Experiments in negentropic knowledge: Bernard Stiegler and the philosophy of education II. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1-6.

Certeau, M. D., Giard, L., & Mayol, P. (1998). The practice of everyday life, volume 2: Living and cooking.  Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.

Debord, G. (1958). Theory of the dérive. Internationale situationniste, 2(20).

Deligny, F. (2016). The Arachnean and other texts. U of Minnesota Press.

Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Indiana University Press.

Guattari, F. (2005). The three ecologies. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Kim, M. (2021). The pedagogical effects of psychogeographic urban exploration and mapping. Geography, 106(2), 92-100.

Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Duke University Press.

Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Plant, S. (2000). The effects of mobile telephones on social and individual life. Report commissioned by Motorola.

Plant, S. (2002). The most radical gesture: The Situationist International in a postmodern age. Routledge.

Richardson, T. (2017). Assembling the assemblage: developing schizocartography in support of an urban semiology. Humanities, 6(3), 47.

Submissions to the Special Issue are invited on topics such as:

❖ The use of video technologies as memory devices to support individuals

❖ To explore new mediated subjectivities via video technologies in a therapeutic fashion

❖ To explore augmented reality and video technologies as heuristic pedagogical tools which explore the question of impersonal affect

❖ Using video technologies as creative communication means, a means to explore our algorithmic lives

❖ Using video technologies to explore global, social, economic and educational issues

Articles must adhere to the journal’s author guidelines.

VJEP privileges submissions with a strong visual/video component. Articles should be no more than 3000 words in length with accompanying relevant video and/or visual material(s) and should be submitted through the journal system. Please indicate you are submitting to the Special Issue when submitting your article.

Timeline

1^st April :Abstract to guest editor

1st August 2022: Full article due to guest editor

1st September 2022: Notifications of acceptance

20th October 2022: Revised articles due

End December 2022: Expected publication

Contact our Guest Editors:

Joff P.N. Bradley  or

Masayuki Iwase