Gary Hall and I have submitted a pre-study of the paper we are writing for a special issue of New Formations to the accompanying online symposium Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net, organised by Sas Mays and Nick Thoburn. Our submission is entitled ‘(Im)materialities of Text: The Book as a Form of Political & Conceptual Resistance in Art & Academia’. It is open for comments on the symposium’s website, (more specifically, here) together with papers by renowned academics such as Richard Burt, Johanna Drucker, Davin Heckman, Sas Mays, and Nick Thoburn. Underneath the symposium announcement.

Online symposium announcement:

Organised by Sas Mays (University of Westminster) and Nick Thoburn (University of Manchester)

This online symposium brings together researchers and practitioners who work on the material culture of the book and publishing. The aim is neither to uncritically champion the capacities of digital media, nor to fetishize the printed form. Our concern, rather, is with the interplay and mutation of form, medium, metaphor, and content across printed and digital mediums – between the codex and the net. The symposium will explore a number of themes:

• Diagrammatic writing

• Biopolitics of the book

• The book as resistance

• Materiality of the infinite text

• Textual materialism

• Deliberation in digital reading

• The politics of independent publishing

Organised around six short papers and an online conversation among practitioners of independent publishing, the conference is open to comment and discussion from online readers. In keeping with its theme, Materialities of Text is a hybrid of symposium, online discussion forum, and writing workshop for a special issue of the journal New Formations.

The journal issue will contain some additional articles; we invite interested parties to contact us to discuss ideas or propose papers <s.mays@westminster.ac.uk> and <N.Thoburn@manchester.ac.uk>

Materialities of Text is co-sponsored by Archiving Cultures at The University of Westminster and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC)