FSAC 2022 – Pre-Constituted Panel Calls for Abstracts | Appel à propositions pour panels préconstitués – ACÉC 2022

By webmaster On December 21, 2021 · In Annual Conference, Calls for Papers, News, Student News

Pre-Constituted Panel Calls for Abstracts

Panel proposals for The Annual Conference of the Film Studies Association of Canada (FSAC), May 12-15, 2022. Please review the pre-constituted panel call for abstracts below. If you are interested in applying for any of them send the required abstract and bio to the specific panel chair by January 15th.

Each panel chair will inform you of their decision by January 25th and the abstracts they have selected to be included in their final submission will be sent to the Conference Committee on January 31.

If your paper is not selected for the panel you have applied for you are welcome to submit it as an individual paper for the January 31 deadline (see the larger 2022 Conference CFP for more details).

Appel à propositions pour panels préconstitués

Vous trouverez ci-bas des propositions de panels pour la conférence annuelle de l’Association canadienne d’études cinématographiques (ACÉC), qui se tiendra du 12 au 15 mai 2022. Veuillez consulter les appels à propositions des panels préconstitués ci-dessous. Si vous souhaitez postuler pour l’un d’entre eux, envoyez le résumé et la biographie requis au(x) responsable(s) du panel en question d’ici le 15 janvier 2022.

Chaque président·e de panel vous informera de sa décision d’ici le 25 janvier. Les propositions ainsi sélectionnées pour être incluses dans leur soumission finale et envoyées au Comité de la conférence le 31 janvier.

Si votre proposition n’est pas sélectionnée pour le panel pour lequel vous avez postulé, nous vous invitons à la soumettre en tant que présentation individuelle pour la date limite du 31 janvier (voir l’appel général de la Conférence 2022 pour plus de détails).

Panel Call Table of Contents

Reframing the Nation: Racialized/Queer Diasporic Independent Women Filmmakers in Canada
Making Spaces for Repair, Making Room for Other Virtual Reality Futurities
Antenational Cinemas: Rethinking Indigenous and Canadian Images
Social Media as Cinemas of Attraction
Utopies adolescentes à la télévision/TV Teen Utopias
Passages, Transitions, and Transformations: Imagining Intersectional Feminist Media and Film Futures
Living Archives and Counter-Archives in Film, Video, and Media Arts in Canada
Experiments in Independent Film & Media in Canada

1. Reframing the Nation: Racialized/Queer Diasporic Independent Women Filmmakers in Canada

This panel is dedicated to a close engagement with films produced by racialized and queer racialized independent women filmmakers in Canada. It aims to ignite conversations around the often underexamined cinematic visions, perspectives, and legacies of especially first and second generation racialized/queer women filmmakers engaged in independent filmmaking between 1980-2020 across Canada. The particular focus is on independent production across all moving image genres and formats, encapsulating artistic practices rooted in personal, political, aesthetic, cultural, philosophical, and/or social justice concerns. We hope to explore the fraught relationship that can arise in independent production between arts funding and policy, and artistic/creative agency especially for minoritized groups. Further, we are interested in exploring how queer/queer diasporic women filmmakers contribute to and/or challenge national and settler narratives through their creative practice.

Submissions can explore the following:

Theoretical explorations of diasporic works by Canadian racialized women or queer/trans women of colour, Black and Indigenous women filmmakers from decolonial, post-colonial, queer diasporic or transnational contexts;
Historiographies of film/video by racialized women filmmakers and queer & trans of colour filmmakers in Canada;
Intersectional critiques of settler nationhood, settler complicities, or homonationalism through the work of racialized women / queer women of colour filmmakers;
Relationships and tensions between cultural identities, diasporic aesthetics, and politics;
Afro-Indigenous and Asian-Indigenous theories, methodologies, histories, praxis;
Diasporic and transnational spatialities; home and belonging, displacement, migration;
Thematic, textual, or aesthetic analyses of documentary, narrative, experimental, activist, and hybrid films (all genres and platforms considered) by queer and racialized women filmmakers;
Reception/audience studies of works by women of colour in Canada; *Arts and culture policy and their impacts on queer/women of colour production in Canada; *Festivals, distributors and other media organisations that support works by Indigenous women & women of colour filmmakers in Canada;
Critical and decolonial uses of technologies;
Archival reanimations by queer/women of colour filmmakers and moving image artists;
Comparative analyses of Canadian productions and international or transnational productions.

*We are especially seeking proposals on Black, Caribbean, South Asian and Arab women filmmakers in Canada.

Submissions from anyone working in these research areas will be considered. Please submit an abstract (300 words) & short bio (125 words) by January 15, 2022 to panel chairs: Dr. Michelle Mohabeer mmohabee@yorku.ca & Dr. May Chew may.chew@concordia.ca.

**Submissions will also be considered for an upcoming edited anthology on the same theme.

2. Making Spaces for Repair, Making Room for Other Virtual Reality Futurities

Starting from the premise that “empathy” has overdetermined and underserved scholarly and popular discourse about virtual reality (VR), this panel seeks papers that expand our understanding of what VR may actually be capable of: as an immersive audiovisual technology, as an artform, and as an aesthetic. To do so, we take as a point of departure the notion that VR, like all media, only works as an “empathy machine” in limited and highly subjective ways. What other feelings, bodies, and futures might VR and media scholars make room for if we hold other doors open?

Without turning a blind eye to the racist (Nakamura 2020), ableist (Redden 2018), and appropriative (Yang 2017) foundations of contemporary VR, this panel seeks contributions that will hold these conditions up to new scrutiny and with an eye towards repair. In an effort to rethink some of the central concepts of virtual reality (immersion, presence, interactivity, etc.), we propose to take space, the body, and their interminglings as central objects of study. How can we build spaces within VR that do not reproduce the colonial, racist, or otherwise toxic tendencies of our current world? What kinds of bodies can we make room for in the spaces VR has to offer? Ultimately, what gets made in the imbrication of body, space, and screen in VR experiences?

We encourage submissions that might address topics including, but not limited, to:

Repairing VR’s affective address
Rethinking central concepts (immersion, presence, interactivity, etc.)
Decolonizing VR spaces
New temporalities in VR/AR
Reparative approaches to VR theory
Indigenous futurities in VR
Afrofuturism and VR
VR and emerging affects, structures of feeling, or other sensorial capacities
VR and ecocriticism
Analyses of VR spaces of maintenance and repair
Spaces of/for immersive experience exhibition
Public/domestic contexts for experiencing VR
Metaverse as space for leisure (and labour)

Proposals should include your name, affiliation, and a short bio (50 words), along with a document listing a title, short abstract (250-350 words), keywords (3-5) and bibliographic references (2-5).

*Veuillez noter que nous acceptons aussi des propositions en français.

Please send your proposals to Aubrey Anable (AubreyAnable@cunet.carleton.ca) or Philippe Bédard (philippebedard@cunet.carleton.ca) by January 15th, 2022.

3. “Antenational Cinemas: Rethinking Indigenous and Canadian Images”

How do First Nations, Inuit, Métis, and Canadian cinemas represent, construct, maintain, and challenge visions of national identity? While this question has been approached through a wide range of methodologies, a definitive view of what constitutes a Canadian national cinema remains elusive. The field continues to explore positions that stress fragments, differences, incongruities, and complexities rather than a coherent historical lineage or homogenous perspective on identity. For Marchessault and Straw (2019), “the idea that Canadian cinema might reveal or express an essential national identity has receded from scholarly and critical writing, but the question of what ideas might occupy its place is far from being resolved” (xxi). This panel seeks to address this opening in field by mapping some of the critical and practical tendencies of Canadian cinemas in relation to the “antenational” – with “ante-” stressing before the nation. While this concept may, for some, connote the idea of an anti-national cinema, my conceptualization of “antenational” does not necessarily foreground as oppositional politics to national identity, even if some Indigenous or Québec films explicitly embrace such a position in relation to Canada’s colonial and political history. Instead, antenational cinemas accounts for a continuum of cinematic pathways that may resist identifying as Canadian, may interrogate the tensions between feminist and nationalist discourses, may advocate for a distinct nation within a nation, or may seek acceptance within national discourses and communities. Furthermore, antenational cinema accounts for BIPOC, Queer, transnational, and diasporic cinemas at a multiplicity of intersections between Canada, outside, and elsewhere (to mobilize Galt and Schoonover’s framing of Queer Cinemas in the World). Therefore, papers within this panel should approach and interrogate definitions of national cinema and Canadian identity.

Key words: Indigenous cinemas, Canadian cinemas, minoritarian, national cinema, antenational

Possible topics include:

Indigenous cinemas that mobilize pre-contact and other films as “before” the nation
Women filmmakers who address the spaces between nationalism and feminism
Diasporic and transnational cinemas that map histories “before” the nation
Indigenous cinemas that challenge and interrogate discourses of the Canadian nation state
Québec cinemas that explore the idea of a nation within a nation
Films from the Prairies or Atlantic that stress differences or similarities (national identity)
Queer cinemas that foreground a “before” the nation that is political or fantastic
Black Canadian filmmakers who increase representation or confront racism in Canada
BIPOC directors who expose the fallacies of multiculturalism
Early feature films that map alternative potentialities within the history of Canadian cinemas

Please send proposals to Terrance McDonald (terrance.mcdonald@utoronto.ca) by 15 January 2022. The proposals should contain: name, affiliation, a short bio (50 words), paper title, and a 250-350-word abstract, keywords (3-5), and bibliographic references (3-5).

4. Social Media as Cinemas of Attraction

We are living in a screen saturated culture which, within the demands of the ‘attention economy’ (Goldhaber 1997), continues to turn increasingly to the moving image to hold our gaze. It is hard in these times as film and media scholars not to think of the multiplicitous histories of cinema aesthetics that inform, knowingly or not, thevisual cultures that circulate and go viral across social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. The integration into Instagram’s design over the last two years of ‘Stories’ and ‘Reels’ as a means of competing with TikTok’s default format of short video vignettes (which is itself a remake of Vine) has led to a developing interest among film and media scholars on how to account for the echoes, appropriations, and remixes of earlier visual histories (Avdeef 2021, Lever, Highfield, Abadin 2020). This panel invites papers that consider the cinematic elements of social media content. This could include anything from the narrative logic of memes to viral videos and trending dance challenges. What about the formation and circulation of these newer moving image practices index prior histories of film and media production? And perhaps most importantly, to what social, cultural, and political effect?

Keywords: social media, cinema, moving image, screen cultures, media histories, aesthetics

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Social media as a 21st century cinema of attractions
The avant-garde, experimental, amateur aesthetics of videos online
The intersection of fine art and popular culture on social media platforms
The use of cinema vocabularies and histories in social media practices
Memes as cinematic narrative vignettes
The reliance on films, characters, figures in pop culture remixing of digital culture
Activist uses of film and media historical practices now
The promise and limitations of visual representation in digital cultural spaces
The violence of using Black, Indigneous, racialized, and queer bodies as excess in meme and gif cultures
The racism, ableism, trans and homophobia of social media algorithms and their impact on digital visual cultural production.

Please send proposals to Shana MacDonald (shana.macdonald@uwaterloo.ca) by January 15th. Please include in your proposal your name, affiliation, and a short bio (50 words), along with a document listing a title, short abstract (250-350 words), keywords (3-5) and bibliographic references (2-5).

5. Utopies adolescentes à la télévision

L’adolescence est l’époque du « pas encore », typique des utopies et, en même temps, un moment ayant ses caractéristiques propres, très puissantes. Est-elle l’espace (télévisuel) pour repenser notre futur? Elle est un sujet de plus en plus présent dans les séries télé récentes : pensons à Euphoria, Genera+ion, Sex Education, Dear White People, We Are Who We Are, Never Have I Ever, SKAM, la permanence de la franchise Degrassi au Canada et, au Québec, Le Chalet, La vie compliquée de Léa Olivier, L’Académie... Le territoire est en pleine expansion, remodelant un genre bien connu au cinéma et à la télévision, entre nostalgie et utopie. Les séries arrivent à raconter la dimension microscopique du quotidien des ados tout en construisant une tension vers l’avenir — à la fois une manière de repousser la fin et d’y tendre — que la narration en épisodes réalise bien. De plus, l’expérience d’une série est parcourue par une puissante incertitude qui s’allie bien à l’état d’hésitation, désorientation et maladresse de l’adolescence. Pour ce qui concerne les questions représentées, la Génération Z est le lieu d’une attention plus forte envers la diversité, le féminisme, le changement climatique et devient un nouveau terrain pour un renouvellement des thématiques. S’agit-il simplement de stratégies de marché, ou d’un espace politique pour une façon de faire les choses différemment ? Qu’est-ce que le concept d’utopie queer peut mettre à jour dans le panorama contemporain des études télévisuelles et médiatiques ?

Mots-clés : télévision, séries, adolescence, queer, utopie, publics, futur

Thèmes possibles:

L’adolescence et le futur de la télévision;
L’adolescent.e des séries comme sujet politique;
Les caractéristiques formelles des séries portant sur l’adolescence;
Les séries adolescentes comme exemple de « télévision queer »;
Les publics des séries qui représentent des ados;
Le lien avec les réseaux sociaux, dans la série et dans son dispositif transmédiatique;

Des contributions portant sur ces questions (ou d’autres!) à partir de la perspective de l’esthétique télévisuelle, des études culturelles, queer, ou de production, y compris avec une approche transnationale, sont les bienvenues.

Contact: marta.boni@umontreal.ca

TV Teen Utopias

Adolescence is the age of the “not there yet”, typical of utopias, and, at the same time, it is a time with its specificities. Is it the (televisual) space for rethinking our future? Teenagers are more and more present in recent TV series: think of Euphoria, Genera + ion, Sex Education, Dear White People, We Are Who We Are, Never Have I Ever, SKAM, the permanence of the Degrassi franchise in Canada and, in Quebec, Le Chalet, La vie compliquée de Léa Olivier, The Academy … The territory is in full expansion, reshaping a genre well known in cinema and television, between nostalgia and utopia. TV series manage to display the microscopic dimension of the daily life of teenagers while building a tension towards the future – both a way of postponing the end and reaching for it – that serial storytelling achieves well. In addition, the experience of a series is riddled with a powerful uncertainty that combines well with the hesitation, disorientation and awkwardness, also typical of adolescence. Regarding the issues represented, Generation Z is the place of greater attention to diversity, feminism, climate change and becomes a new ground for a renewal of themes. Are these just market strategies, or is it the political space for a way to do things differently? What can the concept of queer utopia bring to light in the contemporary television and media studies panorama?

Keywords: television, series, adolescence, queer, utopia, audiences, future

Possible themes:

Adolescence and the future of television;
The adolescent series as a political subject;
The formal characteristics of the series dealing with adolescence;
Teenage series as an example of “queer television”;
Audiences of series that represent teenagers;
The link with social networks, in the series and in its transmedia system;

Contributions addressing these issues (or others!) From the perspective of television aesthetics, cultural, queer, or production studies, including a transnational approach, are welcome.

Please send proposals to Marta Boni (marta.boni@umontreal.ca) by January 15th. Please include in your proposal your name, affiliation, and a short bio (50 words), along with a document listing a title, short abstract (250-350 words), keywords (3-5) and bibliographic references (2-5).

6. Passages, Transitions, and Transformations: Imagining Intersectional Feminist Media and Film Futures

Feminist film and media studies have made important interventions into heteronormative histories by indexing the space(s), place(s), and labour of women and nonbinary people within film and media in ways that interrogate the seemingly objective neutrality of their canons. At the same time, some of the most popular forms of feminism, in both the past and present, have focused on a white feminine figure that obscures other social inequities (Banet Weiser 2018; Daniels 2016) and does not challenge existing social relations (Gill 2017). Popular signifers of white feminism overlook the significant and long-standing contributions of Black, Indigenous, and racialized feminist and queer activists that have radically disrupted dominant forms of representation and cultural work. Notably, these kinds of (in)visibility within and across the screens of social media platforms, media, and films are at the fore of contemporary feminsit media scholarship. Reflecting on these histories and on-going tensions, this panel invites submissions that broadly seek to identify, explore, interrogate, and/or imagine intersectional feminist (Collins 1990, 2017, 2019; Crenshaw 1989, 1991) film and media scholarship, methods, practices, and tools from both the past and present that may be adapted and extended upon as we look to develop more equitable and sustainable futures in our scholarly, activist, and creative practices.

Keywords: Intersectional feminism; feminist media studies; feminist film studies; digital activism; methodology; practice

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Creative explorations and analyses on the continuities, contradictions, and comparisons between (the passing of) time, space, and place and their impacts on feminist activist media and film;
Queer and feminist media and film and postcolonial, Indigenous, and Afrofuturist theories, methodologies, case studies, praxes, and applications;
Critical analyses of the feminist, queer, racialized, and decolonial politics and uses of technologies;
Archival, aesthetic, thematic, creative, and critical analyses of feminist, queer, postcolonial, and anti-racist film and media;
Analyses, case studies, and theorizations of how feminists create, use, and circulate digital artifacts that contribute to the formation of their own communities and digital assemblies;
Articulations and analyses of feminist, queer, decolonial, postcolonial, and anti-racist digital stories and artifacts and the circulation of these stories and artifacts among a variety of digital platforms, media, and spheres of power;
Explorations of feminist, queer, postcolonial, decolonial, and anti-racist media protest and resistance and the ways that they foster collective action and coalitional affinities.

Please send proposals to Brianna Wiens (biwiens@uwaterloo.ca) by January 15th. In your proposal, please include your name, a short bio (50 words), submission title, a short abstract (250-350 words), keywords (3-5) and bibliographic references (2-5).

7. Living Archives and Counter-Archives in Film, Video, and Media Arts in Canada

Archives are generally associated with things that are dead and static but digital media are impacting the very meaning and location of archives along with the production of more dynamic and diverse histories. Since the archival turn in the early 1990s (generally attributed to the rise of the internet and the expansion of local area networks globally), artists and digital humanists, often working in collaboration with archivists, have been at the forefront of developing new ways to animate and create archives both public and private. Artists are using film and media archives to disrupt traditional forms of history, collection, and national narrative. New approaches to celluloid, video, and digital media are process oriented, participatory, and performative. Archives used in this way foster new living ecologies of entanglement that are generating more complex epistemological models of memory and place.

Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s Audiovisual Heritage is a SSHRC Partnership Grant research-creation project dedicated to activating and remediating audiovisual archives created by Indigenous Peoples (First Nations, Métis, Inuit), the Black community and People of Colour, women, LGBT2Q+ and immigrant communities. Political, resistant, and community-based, counter-archives disrupt conventional narratives and enrich our histories. For the purposes of this project, we have defined counter-archives as political, ingenious, resistant, and community-based. They are embodied differently and have explicit intention to historicize differently, to disrupt conventional national narratives, and to write difference into public accounts. They seek to counter the hegemony of traditional archival institutions that have normally neglected or marginalized women, Indigenous, Inuit and Métis Peoples, the LGBT2Q+ community, and immigrant communities. This panel invites presentations on research and research-creation related to the themes and approaches of Archive/Counter-Archive.

Keywords: archives and counter-archives; archival film, video, and media; community media; media by women, Indigenous, Inuit and Métis Peoples, the LGBT2Q+ community, and immigrant communities.

Please send proposals to Antoine Damiens (kmo@counterarchive.ca) by January 15th. In your proposal, please include your name, a short bio (50 words), submission title, a short abstract (250-350 words), keywords (3-5) and bibliographic references (2-5).

8. Experiments in Independent Film & Media in Canada

Abstract: The current vibrancy of the independent film and media arts sector in Canada and globally is evident. This panel seeks presentations on experimental and independent film, video, and media production, distribution, and exhibition in Canada. Experimental film, video art, and digital media enjoy a rich tradition of scholarship and criticism. This panel also seeks papers on films and media at the margins of these forms: how has experimentation taken place in independent narrative, documentary, industrial, and community media? Co-ops and other artist-run centres operate at the grassroots level to provide access to film and media production, distribution, and exhibition for local communities, including minoritized groups who started separate organizations when excluded from government, industry, and existing independent film and media sectors. Less subject to commercial pressures, the independent sector facilitated a greater degree of formal and cultural innovation and experimentation, enabling new ways of working, including forms of non-hierarchal organization. The independent sector sought to leverage collective power to access resources, and also may teach us about how discourses of gender, sexuality, race, Indigeneity, and ability operate in relation to larger institutions in government (including arts councils), industry, academia, the art world, and archives. How have production histories, distribution ventures, and exhibition sites performed experimental gestures against social and aesthetic convention? The panel is also open to considerations of alternative forms of criticism, innovative archival histories, and contemporary gallery and museum installations and performance. We invite panelists to incorporate an anti-racist approach and an equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) lens to expand Canadian film and media arts history to make it more inclusive of the diversity of – and within – the grassroots cultural communities that engaged in independent experimentation across multiple media forms.

Keywords: experimental film & media; independent film & media; BIPOC voices in film & media history in Canada; community media; film & media cooperatives

Please send proposals to Michael Zryd (zryd@yorku.ca) by January 15th. In your proposal, please include your name, a short bio (50 words), submission title, a short abstract (250-350 words), keywords (3-5) and bibliographic references (2-5).