CFP: Perspectives on Materiality in Animated Media

Call for Panelists: Perspectives on Materiality in Animated Media

For the 2025 Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference, taking place in Chicago, we are looking to put together a panel that explores our shifting understandings of materiality in animated media.

As innovations and developments in digital technology continue to dominate the contemporary media landscape, our relationship with materiality changes, renegotiated and reconsidered in light of constantly changing contexts. As Paul Ward suggests, ‘It is in the process of actively engaging with different contexts that one learns anything. It therefore follows that knowledge about something is produced by constantly critically (re-)evaluating what that something is, and how it relates to its (many) contexts.’

Potential topics include:

• CG imagery
• New media e.g. VR film
• Paradigm shifts brought about by AI
• Craft practices and the politics of representation
• Possible intersections between animation and other disciplines

So far the panel is made up of the following talks:

Anastasiia Gushchina (University of Calgary) – Materiality and the renegotiation of the feminist in Animated Documentary
Cecilia Chen (University of Hong Kong) – Using Quill for Spatial Storytelling in VR Film
Markus Beeken (King’s College, London) – Stop-Motion Materiality and the Supposed “return” to analogue practices

If you are interested in joining this panel, please send us an abstract and short bio to markus.beeken@kcl.ac.uk by Monday, 26th of August. Abstracts should be a maximum of 2500 characters long with 3-5 bibliographic sources.