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Call for Graduate Student Applicants: Media Aesthetics IV
2022 Summer Institute in Rhetoric and Public Culture
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208
In Person
July 18–22, 2022
The deadline for applications is Thursday June 9, 2022
Media Aesthetics IV:
The annual Rhetoric and Public Culture Summer Institute at Northwestern University is scheduled to be held on July 18-22, 2021 (with arrival July 17 and departure July 23).
Institute conveners are Dilip Gaonkar (Rhetoric and Public Culture, Northwestern University) and James J. Hodge (English, Northwestern University).
This year’s theme is Media Aesthetics.
What does it mean to study and to theorize media today? What does it mean to study aesthetic texts and experience in a global media ecology no longer dominated by the long-standing paradigmatic forms of the disciplines of art history, literary studies, and cinema studies (painting, the novel, film) but rather by a panoply of multimedia forms (video games, digital art, social media, sound media)? What are the key sites of inquiry and the best theoretical resources for thinking through the saturation of contemporary life, politics and culture by media technologies? The challenges facing critical investigations into these questions are legion and daunting: from climate change and intense social inequities to divisive politics and more. Keeping these larger contexts and issues in mind, the summer institute will host a week of lecture and discussion on the topic of “media aesthetics.” In choosing “media aesthetics,” we affirm that big questions may be addressed at the levels of individual and collective experience and, moreover, as questions of mediation specific to a vast and uneven field of aesthetic forms circulating in global networks. Further, this seminar affirms the role of artworks and aesthetic experience more broadly as key sites of encounter. For the past several decades if not since at least the 1960s aesthetic production in its institutional manifestations has become more varied, less medium specific, and perhaps more fruitfully approached in a comparative manner. One key development here concerns the increasing and uneven ways in which the boundaries between more institutionally-sanctioned forms of aesthetic production and more ordinary vernaculars of experience have come to be understood as permeable and newly articulated and entangled. Taking aesthetics in its Greek sense of aisthesis (perception or feeling), we affirm the significance of methodologies and approaches such as affect theory, queer theory, phenomenology, Black studies, and psychoanalysis over and above approaches valorizing technology as such. Taking note of many local interventions in theoretical approaches to media studies, however, the summer institute asks what affinities and commonalities these often-disconnected discourses share.
Institute Format and Application Process
The institute will consist of five days of presentations and discussions led by visiting scholars and Northwestern faculty. This year’s visiting scholars include: Ramon Amaro (University College London), Bishnu Ghosh (University of California, Santa Barbara), Jean Ma (Stanford University), Bhaskar Sarkar (University of California, Santa Barbara), and Aarthi Vadde (Duke University).
The institute is sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication (CGCC), an interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication. The CGCC will subsidize transportation (up to $250), lodging (double-occupancy), and some meals (breakfast and lunch every day and two group dinners) for admitted students.
Applicants should send a brief letter of nomination from their academic advisor, along with a one-page statement explaining their interest in participating in this year’s institute, to the summer institute coordinator Vidura Bahadur (ViduraBahadur2023@u.northwestern.edu)We will adopt a policy of rolling admissions. Priority will therefore be granted to strong applications that are submitted in a timely fashion, preferably by June 9, 2022. All inquiries should be directed to Vidura Bahadur.
Faculty Bios:
Ramon Amaro is Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South at University College London. His writing, research and practice emerge at the intersections of Black Study, psychopathology, digital culture, and the critique of computational reason. He draws on Frantz Fanon’s theory of sociogenic alienation to problematise the de-localisation of the Black psyché in contemporary computational systems, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. Ramon’s research pulls away from notions of psychic negation, as set forth by the Fanonian model of representation, to investigate alternative modes of relation between race and technology. His ultimate aim is to develop new methodologies for the study of race and digital culture. Ramon is the author of The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being (Sternberg/MIT Press, 2022). He is a founding member of the Queer Computing Consortium (QCC), which investigates the “languages” of computation in its role in shaping locally embedded community practices.
Bishnupriya Ghosh is Professor of English and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She teaches environmental media and global postcolonial studies. Much of her early scholarly work interrogated the relations between the global and the postcolonial; area studies and transnational cultural studies; popular, mass, and elite cultures. While publishing essays on literary, cinematic, and visual culture in several collections and journals such asboundary 2, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Public Culture and Screen, in her first two books, Ghosh focused on contemporary elite and popular cultures of globalization: When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011). In the last decade, Ghosh turned to risk distributions and their relationship to media. She has written several essays on the subject and has co-edited collection (with Bhaskar Sarkar), The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (2020). She is working now on a monograph entitled The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media, which considers how mediatic processes detect and compose epidemics as crises events.
Jean Ma is Professor in the Department of Art and Art History and the Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute at Stanford University. She has published books on the temporal poetics of Chinese cinema (Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema), singing women on film (Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema), and the relationship of cinema and photography (Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography). She is the coeditor of “Music, Sound, and Media,” a book series at the University of California Press. Her writing has appeared in Camera Obscura, Criticism, Film Quarterly, Grey Room, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and October. Her forthcoming book At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators was the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer Book Grant.
Bhaskar Sarkar is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke University Press, 2009). He has coedited the collections Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (Routledge, 2009), Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global(Duke University Press, 2017), and The Routledge Handbook of Media and Risk (Routledge, 2020). He has also coedited two journal special issues: Postcolonial Studies (2005), on “The Subaltern and the Popular”; and BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies (2012), on “Indian Documentary Studies.” At present, he is completing a monograph titled “Cosmoplastics: Bollywood’s Global Gesture.” He has also begun work on two additional monographs: one about piratical practices in the Global South, and another on queer underground club cultures in millennial Los Angeles.
Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. She works in the field of 20th-21st century Anglophone literature. She looks at how literary history interfaces with theories of internationalism, the history of computation, and media studies more generally. Her book Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2016 was published by Columbia UP in 2016 and won the ACLA’s 2018 Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book in the field of comparative literature. Her book in progress is called “We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0.” In it, she considers how technical and rhetorical shifts in the formulation of the World Wide Web (from network to platform) are shaping contemporary literary culture and popular literacy practices. In addition to her monograph projects, Vadde is co-editor of a volume on the history of literary criticism entitled The Critic as Amateur (Bloomsbury Academic 2019), an open-access cluster of essays entitled Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism (Post45), and the Palgrave Handbook of 20th and 21st Century Literature and Science. She is the co-host of Novel Dialogue, a podcast about how novels are made and what to make of them. Scholarly articles have appeared in Comparative Literature, Modernism/Modernity, New Literary History, NOVEL, and PMLA amongst others.
The Screen Cultures Graduate Student Association of Northwestern University invites our fellow graduate scholars to submit abstracts for this year’s Backward Glances conference with the theme of “Saturation,” which will be held in person, September 30-October 1. Our keynote speakers will be Professors Anna Kornbluh and Cáel Keegan.
Proposals of no more than 300 words are due by June 15th. Please see our complete CFP below for more details.
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Backward Glances 2022: Saturation
The Screen Cultures Graduate Student Conference
Department of Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern University
September 30th-October 1st, 2022, in person
Keynote Speakers: Professors Anna Kornbluh (University of Illinois Chicago) and Cáel Keegan (Grand Valley State University)
Submission Deadline: June 15, 2022
Backward Glances, Northwestern University’s biennial graduate student media and historiography conference, returns in 2022 to engage the concept of Saturation. Broadly defined as a particularly intense mediated experience or an inability to absorb additional material, saturation operates as a way of thinking about the excesses of representation in, and our encounters with, media both past and present.
From the 24/7 news cycle, to Zoom, to Peak TV, to TikTok, we live in an age of total media saturation. Drawing on this sense of ‘media overload,’ this year’s conference invokes saturation as a heuristic for theorizing and historicizing media past and present. How, for example, does the concept of saturation differently operate on aesthetic, narrative, and industrial levels? What does it mean when “no more can be added”? How does saturation as a property of the image “color” our encounters with media? And how might saturation help us understand historical shifts in screen media cultures?
We invite inventive explorations of media that embrace both the qualitative and quantitative ambiguities at work in the concept of saturation. Presentations may engage the theme of saturation broadly construed, including topics such as, but certainly not limited to:
- Opulence
- Excess
- Serialities
- Performance
- Framing and containment
- Immersive media
- Intensities of image
- Ecologies
- Realism
- Late capitalism
- Color technologies & race
- Phenomenology
- Sensory experience
We invite scholarship from across disciplines and methodologies, backward-, forward-, and present-facing. For consideration, please submit a document that includes paper title and a 300-word abstract to backwardglancesconference@gmail.com by June 15, 2022. In the body of the submission email, please include a 100-word bio including your name and institutional affiliation. Please send your abstract as an email attachment in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format and do not include any identifying information in the file containing your abstract. Participants will be notified by early July.
Anna Kornbluh, University of Illinois Chicago
Anna Kornbluh’s research and teaching interests center on Victorian literature and Critical Theory, with a special emphasis in formalism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and theory of the novel. She is the author of The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago 2019), Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury “Film Theory in Practice” series, 2019), and Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP 2014). Her current research concerns impersonality, objectivity, mediation, and abstraction as residual faculties of the literary in privatized urgent times. She is the founding facilitator of two scholarly cooperatives: V21 Collective and InterCcECT.
Cáel Keegan, Grand Valley State University
Dr. Keegan is a cultural theorist of transgender/queer media and literature. He is primarily interested in the aesthetic forms transgender and queer people have created and how those forms shape our popular lifeworlds. He is the elected Secretary of the Queer Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and has appeared on Michigan Radio and in the Vice Guide to Cinema’s episode on “New Trans Cinema.” Dr. Keegan teaches courses in queer, transgender, and feminist theories, popular and visual cultures, American studies, and LGBTQ cultures/identities/histories.
Archive/Counter-Archive and Public Journal are pleased to announce a competition for a one-year MITACs Accelerate Postdoctoral Fellowship position hosted by York University and Public Access Journal of interdisciplinary art.
Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s Moving Images Heritage is a six-year SSHRC Partnership Grant dedicated to researching and remediating audiovisual archives created by women, Indigenous Peoples, the LGBTQ2+ community and immigrant communities. Political, resistant, and community-based, counter-archives disrupt conventional narratives and enrich our histories. The project’s research is committed to finding solutions for safekeeping Canada’s audiovisual heritage. We seek to research and remediate audiovisual heritage that is most vulnerable to disappearance and inaccessibility, fostering a community and network dedicated to creating best practices and cultural policies.
PUBLIC is an interdisciplinary journal with a core focus on visual art. It strives to be an accessible, smart and beautiful journal about art with the timeliness and visual interest of a magazine, but the longevity of a book. PUBLIC maintains an enduring and esteemed profile in the periodicals market with its demonstrated commitment to publishing works, both written and visual, that are innovative and challenging, forward-thinking and critical, and engage both internationally and locally inflected perspectives. The journal devotes each 180+ – page, perfect-bound semi-color issue to a contemporary problem or theme and features content that combines critical writing, rich illustration throughout, and artist portfolios. PUBLIC stands apart from other publications by being conceived as a hybrid intellectual and creative forum that investigates how theoretical and critical issues intersect with art and public culture.
MITACs is a national, not-for-profit organization that builds partnerships between academia and industry. MITACs Postdoctoral Fellowships bring academic expertise into a partner organization, working on a specific project related to your area of research.
About the Research
The successful candidate is expected to focus on research into emerging hybrid media publication platforms that integrate print and online media in creative, engaging and critical ways. A focus on Knowledge Mobilization for Archive/Counter-Archive’s case studies, working group outputs and artist residencies will be the primary means for testing content through diverse social media platforms and interfaces. Research outcomes will directly inform the future publishing practices of Public as the journal evolves with online readership and engagement.
We invite applications from, in particular, interdisciplinary scholars who have earned a doctorate in communications, media studies, archival or information studies, digital media, or art history, and have expertise in such fields such as creative publishing, online outreach/engagement, communications, and digital media design. The position requires that the candidate has strong skills and experience in research creation, knowledge translation, community arts engagement, and familiarity with social media, video hosting and marketing platforms. An understanding of open-source web content management systems is an asset. Required soft skills include outstanding writing and communication skills, a strong collaborative working style, good time management, and adaptability.
This postdoc position will include opportunities to produce publications, participate in conference presentations and directly contribute to content design for Archive/Counter-Archive’s hybrid publications. It is expected that the candidate will divide their time between York University and Public, also housed at York University’s campus.
Funding
The MITACs Postdoc will receive an annual salary of $45,000.00 office space at York University, use of a computer and full access to York University Libraries. They will be supervised by Professor Michael Zryd in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts and will work closely with Public’s Editorial Board.
Duration: One year, with a possible 1-year renewal.
Candidates must have defended their dissertation by May 1st 2022. (This is a firm deadline)
Applications are due Monday May 13, 2021 at 5:00PM EST.
The position will begin in June 2022.
How to apply
Applicants should forward a cover letter, a brief research statement (maximum 1 page), curriculum vitae, as well as the names of three academic references in one PDF document to Dr. Antoine Damiens, Archive/Counter-Archive Project Manager at adamiens@yorku.ca
All correspondence should be addressed to:
Professor Janine Marchessault
c/o Dr. Antoine Damiens, Project Manager
SSHRC Partnership Grant, Archive/Counter-Archive
YORK UNIVERSITY | 2001F Victor Phillip Dahdaleh Building 4700 Keele Street · Toronto ON · Canada · M3J 1P3
“The chaos of the mind cannot constitute a reply to the providence of the
universe. All it can be is an awakening in the night, where all that can be heard is
anguished poetry let loose. ”
— Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil
Greek Chaos (the gap between heaven and earth) births Gaia (earth) and Eros (sexual desire) which procreate to make other deities. Under the acceleration of modernity we encounter the relentless accumulation of knowledge without understanding or grounding. We sense our own bodies and feel the threat of chaos loom in the mass of ambivalent sensations that rise into our perception. We embrace chaos and its vicissitudes, asking to be demolished by its operations so we can be reborn – or die – anew.
For our inaugural graduate conference we invite you to think of chaos as a space of potential for re-shaping dominant modes of engaging with the world. How does art diffuse or activate chaos? In what ways do mythological formulations of chaos speak to our present moment? How does your artistic/scholarly work respond to, react against, or embrace chaos?
We are seeking traditional and non-traditional forms of presentation: Papers, screenings, performances, animation, workshops, theatre, puppetry, curatorial projects, sound work, poetry, DJA/J sets, light works, papers, live body horror, sculpture, relational aesthetics, stripteases, pataphysical contemplations, weddings, rituals, massages, parties, beckonings, radio plays, podcasts, found drama – as befits a conference on chaos, the options are limitless.
- Geopolitics and the mapping of chaos
- Quantum chaos and chaos in scientific fields
- Gendered and affective dimensions of chaos
- Competing cosmologies and mythologies of chaos
- Ontologies of chaos, e.g. Mallarme’s Un coup de dés
- Chaos magic, conspiracy, and the supernatural
- Politics of chaos: anarchism and its lineages
- Performances of chaos, e.g. John Cage
- Phenomenologies of chaos: noise, pareidolia, madness
Submit proposals of up to 500 words to sccs.filmandmediagraduate@gmail.com by May 10, 2022. The conference will be in-person in Kingston, Ontario. Individual and collaborative proposals are welcome. You can include images and audio in your proposals, and please let us know your tech needs. If you require alternative submission formats, please let us know.
Visions of Change: A CMF Graduate Student Conference
https://news.ucalgary.ca/news/visions-change-cmf-graduate-student-conference
May 10 – May 11 2022, 11:30 am to 3:30 pm
Online via Zoom
(Potential in-person social events on May 11) *
This year’s CMF Graduate Student Conference theme is Visions of Change. We chose this theme to focus on research that is forward-looking and evokes new perspectives. In light of the struggles we have faced globally and within our own communities in the past two years, we believe that it is more imperative than ever to spotlight critical, creative, and hopeful scholarship.
- What do we mean by ‘vision’?
We chose the word vision to represent our desire to envision a brighter future ahead in our society and in scholarship, through inspiring, insightful, and innovative research.
- Why ‘change’?
If the past two years of this pandemic have taught us anything, it is recognizing the importance of ongoing transformations in communication, media, technology, and culture in our everyday lives. We are eager to showcase work that critically reflects on the changes we have experienced as a society, and that is ingrained with revolutionary hope, positivity, and inclusivity.
CALL FOR PAPERS
This is a call for papers for the Visions of Change conference. Please submit your proposal here by the proposal submission deadline on March 31, 2022.
Below are some examples of topics you may wish to present on for this year’s Visions of Changeconference:
- Media and activism (anti-racism, feminism, anticolonialism, etc.)
- Representations and power in media
- Popular culture in the media, and media identities (influencers, etc.)
- New media industries (social media platforms, etc.)
- Cinema, documentary, photography, and sound as mediums of change
- Algorithmic media
- Digital citizenship
- The digital divide and inequities to access
- Censorship and other challenges to journalism and reporting
These are only some topics you may wish to address during the conference this year; proposal submissions that fall under the umbrella of this year’s theme are encouraged even if they do not directly address one of the topics listed.
The Visions of Change conference welcomes any proposal submissions for the following presentation formats:
- Short talks (200-word abstract): A shorter presentation, lasting 5 minutes in duration. An ideal option for a presenter that desires to share and discuss an idea or research-in-progress work that may not be fully developed or completed. First-time presenters, senior undergraduate students and MA students are all encouraged to apply.
- Long talks (300-word abstract): A longer presentation, lasting 10-15 minutes in duration. An ideal option for a presenter seeking to share and discuss a more developed analysis on a research topic of their choosing.
- We also welcome proposals for alternative formats. Proposal submissions should include a short description of the desired format and time allotment (minimum 5 minutes and maximum 20 minutes) in addition to the accompanying 200-word proposal/abstract. While it is not guaranteed, we will try our best to accommodate an alternative format.
Please, note that time will be set aside for a Q&A session after the presentation(s).
While writing your proposal, all applicants are asked to consider an equity, diversity, and inclusivity (EDI) framework in their submission. Please ensure that you have completed the EDI pledge in your proposal form. More information regarding the EDI framework can be found on the webpage for the University of Calgary’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion here.
If you have any questions about this CFP, please reach out to Berenice Cancino (berenice.cancino@ucalgary.ca) or Xenia Reloba de la Cruz (xenia.relobadelacruz@ucalgary.ca).
Thank you and we look forward to your submissions!
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*This conference will be held online (via Zoom) out of an abundance of caution because of the evolving and uncertain circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on public health restrictions and the safety of potential participants in the city of Calgary. The feasibility of organizing optional in-person social events as part of the CMF Graduate Student Conference will be determined at a later date and will be conveyed to conference participants.
Moving/Pictures
Program in Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh
Keynote Speaker: Haidee Wasson of Concordia University
Date: September 23-24
The University of Pittsburgh Film and Media Studies Program is pleased to announce “Moving/Pictures,” its eleventh Annual Graduate Student Conference.
Conventional historiographical and theoretical assumptions in film history and media archaeology have often belied the stability of their apparatuses, objects, and spaces of reception. Yet even in the “classical” period, scholars have unearthed a fluid moving image ecology that has been easy for us to overlook in favor of a supposedly canonical and rigid exhibition/apparatus structure. Along with Charles Acland, Ariel Rogers, Alison Griffiths, and others, Haidee Wasson has worked in the past decade to turn the field’s attention to film and media’s longstanding formal, cultural, and technological history in classrooms, museums, prisons, planetariums, shopping centers, airplanes, trains, and elsewhere. This turn has encouraged us to consider the cinema theater as but one site in a panoply of historically contingent spaces of media encounter.
Rather than treating the proliferation of moving image media in diffuse and dispersed spaces as a contemporary phenomenon abetted by the digital, Moving/Pictures encounters the cinematic as a media ontology permanent only in its flux. Seeking scholarship on exhibition practices, portability, technology, reception, transportation, architecture, and the general relationship of media to its locations and spaces, the conference calls on participants who take seriously the transience of film and media. The transience of media across borders takes on new forms and shapes, forcing us to contend with even more global multiplicities of moving image contexts. In the dialectic between the stability of the “picture” and the unfixedness of “moving,” this conference seeks a productive scholarly tension.
- Exhibition Histories
- Theories and Spaces of Reception
- “Useful Cinema”
- Nontheatrical Cinema
- Television and New Media outside the home
- Stereoscopy and the Sensorium
- Urban/Rural Geography
- Distribution Networks
- Film Promotion/Exhibitional Decoration
- Travelling Cinemas
- Cinema and the Body
- Haptics and Movement
- Museums, Film and Musealization
- Avant Garde and Video Art Practices and Spaces
- Borders and Transience
- International Media Flows
- Global Exhibition Networks
- The Museum as a Cinematic Space
- Film Curatorship
- Portable film and media technologies
- Paratexts and Paratextual Film Cultures
- Guerilla and Underground Cinema
Interested graduate students should submit abstracts (maximum 300 words) – along with biographies (maximum 100 words), institutional/departmental affiliations, and current email – to pittfilmgradconference@gmail.com by June 15th, 2022. For more information, please contact the Pitt Film and Media Studies Graduate Student organization at the above email.
Accessibility arrangements: The Conference has traditionally been an in-person event, giving participants the opportunity to connect with their peers. However, academic travel presented a challenge to graduate students of all abilities well before the COVID-19 related restrictions emerged. Considering the steady improvement of COVID-conditions in the USA, we are planning the conference as an in-person event with some papers delivered through synchronous Zoom presentations. Successful applicants will be encouraged to visit the University of Pittsburgh and give their papers in-person, but we hope to accommodate a number of remote speakers through this format.
The Dalhousie Association of Graduate Students in English Presents
Destinations and Departures An Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference
August 11-13, 2022, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia
It’s a dangerous business, […] going out of your door, […] You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.
—J.R.R. Tolkien
Most of us have started out on a journey—literal, intellectual, emotional—aiming for one destination and arriving somewhere else entirely. When we look back on the path we took to get there, what can we learn about ourselves from how our plans and thinking changed along the way? Moreover, when we look forward to our next destination, do we have any way of knowing where we will arrive?
Many of us have not travelled much—if at all—in the last few years, but that does not make us any less conscious of place, space, movement, and changes. These things continue to impact our lives and our scholarship, whether it is a project that had to rapidly change directions due to the pandemic, or a greater sense of how our lives are shaped by the places we go, have gone, and wish to visit, brought on by staying in one place. Historically, many forces have played a role in forcing, restricting, opening, or limiting movement, whether that be in the form of borders and boundaries, or in the form of expectation and convention.
Our conference this year focuses on the places we go (literally and metaphorically) and the paths we take to get there.
We invite submissions for papers, creative works, or something in between (15 – 20 minutes) from across the disciplines that engage critically with these issues.
Proposed topics include (but are not limited to):
- Travel Writing
- Road Literature
- Tourism
- Transportation
- Space and Place in Literature
- Migration and Trade
- Boundaries (International, Disciplinary…)
- Liminality
- New Disciplinary Directions
- Changes in Scholarly Writing/Methods
- Field Work (Surprises, Complications, Successes, Struggles)
- Public Scholarship
- Ecosystems
- Evolution(s)
- Statistical Modelling
- Exploration
- Climate Fiction and/or Dystopia
- Quest Narratives
- Utopia as Lost Paradise or Future Achievement
- Death and Dying
- Genesis and Apocalypse
Submissions: Please send a 250-word abstract plus a 50-word bio along with your name, current level of graduate study, affiliated university, email address, and current time zone (in UTC) to dagse@dal.ca. Panel submissions are also welcome. Please include “Destinations and Departures Conference Abstract” in the subject line.
Deadline: April 3, 2022
The 24th Annual FSAC Graduate Colloquium will be taking place on February 18th and 19th over Zoom, co-hosted by the Cinema Studies Graduate Student Union at University of Toronto and the Graduate Film Student Association at York University.
Please find attached our full schedule, with a slate of panelists from across the globe. We are also proud to welcome Kemi Adeyemi from the University of Washington, who will deliver our keynote presentation on February 18th, entitled “On Black Apathy.”
The link to join the Zoom Webinar has been shared to the FSAC listserv. If you have not received it or if you want to request access to the event, please reach out to csgraduatestudentunion@gmail.com
Canadian Journal of Film Studies – Call for Papers
Special Issue: Climate Change and Cinema: Imagining Failure, or Failure of the Imagination?
Version française ci-bas
Climate change, and our collective failure to meaningfully meet it head on, is often characterized as a paradigmatic market failure, as well as a failure of democratic politics. But it is equally a failure of the imagination, literary and filmic. Writing in the literary journal Granta in 2003, environmental advocate and author Bill McKibben lamented that climate change “has still to produce an Orwell or a Huxley, a Verne or a Wells, a Nineteen Eighty-Four or a War of the Worlds, or in film any equivalent of On The Beach or Doctor Strangelove. It may never do so.”1
Fast-forward to 2022 and McKibben’s lament rings no less true, though not for a lack of trying. Beginning with the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow the steady rise in global temperatures has been accompanied by a spate of films addressing climate change, directly and indirectly, fictionally and factually. Given this “failure” to produce films that have had an actual social, cultural and political impact, we invite papers that critically examine the relationship between cinema and climate change, including but not limited to our personal and political paralysis in the face of escalating socio-ecological calamities and the threat of a sixth mass extinction. How does cinema reflect and refract our predicament? Can – should – film effectively intervene in the climate crisis? Are the documentaries that adopt a “discourse of sobriety”2 of facts and data the best vehicles to galvanize the public into action or is popular cinema a better tool? What is the relationship between film and climate activism, including intersectional climate justice? Conversely, how does cinema continue to fuel business as usual and populist resistance to decarbonization? And what, in turn, does climate change mean for cinema? How we view and think and write about film?
In order to accommodate as many kinds of contributions as possible, we are open to papers of varied length and approach, and we especially encourage innovative interdisciplinary methods. Proposals should be approximately 300 words, indicate anticipated length, include a short bio, and should be submitted no later than May 1st, 2022. Contributors will be notified by June 1st, 2022. Completed papers will be due January 31st, 2023, with a view to publication in the Fall of 2024.
Send your proposals to the two guest editors:
Dr. André Loiselle
Dean of Humanities
Professor of Film Studies
St. Thomas University
loiselle@stu.ca
Dr. Jason MacLean
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, University of New Brunswick
Adjunct Professor, School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Saskatchewan
j.maclean@unb.ca
Revue canadienne d’études cinématographiques – Appel à contributions
Numéro spécial : Changement climatique et cinéma : imaginer l’échec ou échec de l’imagination ?
Le changement climatique, et notre échec collectif à y faire face de manière significative, est souvent caractérisé comme un échec paradigmatique du marché, ainsi qu’un échec des politiques démocratiques. Mais c’est également un échec de l’imagination, littéraire et cinématographique. Dans un article paru en 2003 dans la revue littéraire Granta, l’environnementaliste et auteur Bill McKibben déplore que le problème existentiel du changement climatique « n’ait toujours pas produit un Orwell ou un Huxley, un Verne ou un Wells, un Nineteen Eighty-Four ou une War of the Worlds, ou au cinéma un équivalent de On The Beach ou Doctor Strangelove. Et peut-être que cela n’arrivera jamais1. »
Vingt ans plus tard et les observations de McKibben semblent toujours vraies, mais non pas parce que personne n’a essayé de relever le défi! Depuis le film The Day After Tomorrow en 2004, l’augmentation constante des températures à l’échelle mondiale a été accompagnée d’une série de films traitant du changement climatique, directement ou indirectement, de manière factuelle ou fictive. Compte tenu de cet « échec » à produire des films ayant eu un véritable impact social, culturel et politique sur cette crise actuelle, nous vous invitons à soumettre des articles qui examinent de manière critique la relation entre le cinéma et le changement climatique, y compris, mais sans s’y limiter, notre paralysie personnelle et collective face à l’escalade des calamités socio-écologiques et à la menace d’une sixième extinction de masse. Comment le cinéma reflète-t-il, et réfracte-t-il, notre atroce situation ? Le cinéma peut-il – devrait-il – intervenir dans la crise climatique ? Les documentaires qui adoptent un « discours de sobriété2 », un discours de faits et de données, sont-ils les meilleurs vecteurs pour mener le public à l’action ou le cinéma populaire est-il un meilleur outil ? Quelle est la relation entre le cinéma et l’activisme climatique, y compris la justice climatique intersectionnelle ? À l’inverse, comment le cinéma continue-t-il d’alimenter le statu quo et la résistance populiste à la décarbonation ? Et que signifie, à son tour, le changement climatique pour le cinéma ? Comment voyons-nous, pensons-nous et écrivons-nous sur le cinémadans un monde profondément affecté par le changement climatique ?
Afin de favoriser le plus de diversité possible, nous sollicitons des articles de longueur et d’approche variées, et encourageons les méthodes interdisciplinaires novatrices. Les propositions doivent inclure un résumé d’environ 300 mots, indiquer la longueur prévue de l’article, inclure une courte biographie et doivent être soumises au plus tard le 1er mai 2022. Vous serez informé avant le 1er juin 2022 si votre soumission a été acceptée. La date de soumission des articles est le 31 janvier 2023, en vue d’une publication à l’automne 2024.
Envoyez vos propositions aux deux éditeurs invités :
André Loiselle
Doyen des sciences humaines
Professeur titulaire d’études cinématographiques
Université Saint-Thomas
loiselle@stu.ca
Jason MacLean
Professeur adjoint, Faculté de droit, Université du Nouveau-Brunswick
Professeur associé, École d’environnement et de durabilité, Université de la Saskatchewan j.maclean@unb.ca
1Bill McKibben, “Worried? Us?” Granta 83 (2003). Amitav Ghosh similarly argues that the climate crisis is also “a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.”/ Amitav Ghosh soutient de la même manière que la crise climatique est aussi « une crise de la culture, et donc de l’imagination ». Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
2Bill Nichols (1991). Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. p.3
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