“Murder, She Tweeted: Crime Narratives and the Digital Age” - Call For Papers

“Murder, She Tweeted: Crime Narratives and the Digital Age”

University of Tampere, Finland, August 23-24, 2018

Keynote speakers: Andrew Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast) & Fiona Peters (Bath Spa University)

The advent of new technologies and digital media have transformed society and influenced cultural narratives. The changes brought about by technological innovations, digitalisation, and globalisation have affected not only the subject matter and themes of contemporary crime narratives but also the production, distribution, and consumption of crime fiction on the global market, as well as the analytical tools, techniques, research methods, and theories available to scholars. These changes are readily visible in detectives’ digital investigations or in how criminals employ digital technology in committing cybercrimes such as online stalking or theft. Moreover, the potential of digitalisation in modifying crime narratives nowadays ranges from podcasts such as “Serial” to Sherlock Holmes fan fiction to transmedia narration in “Sherlock” and the Twitter adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library.

We invite proposals for paper presentations on crime narratives and the digital age from different language and cultural spheres. The conference’s approach to crime and the digital context is wide and covers a variety of contemporary crime narratives (e.g. novels, films, TV series, adaptations, true crime, fan fiction, vlogs, blogs and other social media) that can be examined in a number of ways.

We would like to welcome proposals which address one or several of the following topics (please note that the list is by no means exhaustive):

– production and the global market of crime narratives
– crime narratives, participatory production and fan practices
– new modes of narration and serialised storytelling in crime narratives
– multimodality and transmedia crime narratives
– remakes and social media adaptations of crime narratives
– social media and mobile technologies in or about crime narratives
– crimes and criminal agency
– criminal networks and transnational crime
– crime and thriller narratives and digital geopolitics
– policing, detective agency and (digital) methods of detection
– true crime narratives and cold case archives
– digital humanities and the study of crime narratives
– crime and digital culture in the postcolonial world
– virtual crime
– ecology, crime and digital technologies

Participants may contribute with individual presentations (20 min) or panel proposals (three presenters).

Please submit your proposal (max 300 words for individual presentations; for panels, please submit titles and abstracts of each paper) and a short biographical statement (including name, email address, institutional affiliation) to 

t.helen.mantymaki@jyu.fi and 

maarit.piipponen@uta.fi as attachments in rtf or doc format by March 20, 2018.

Conference fee: there is a conference fee of 70 euros (coffee, lunches, reception) and participants are expected to cover all costs for travel, accommodation and subsistence themselves.

Organising committee:

Dr Helen Mäntymäki, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
Dr Maarit Piipponen, University of Tampere, Finland.
Dr Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
Dr Andrea Hynynen, Finland.