*CFP* "NO CULTURE IS 'LOW' CULTURE", POSGRADUATE CONFERENCE BANGOR UNIVERSITY

No culture is ‘low’ culture

Centre for Film, Television, and Film Studies

Bangor University

One day peer conference for post-graduate students

Tuesday 16 April 2018

Culture which was traditionally excluded from academia has found its way into scholarship in recent years. Screen studies, media studies and popular culture are now considered by many to be legitimate lines of academic enquiry. However, students within these disciplines still must fight against prejudice towards supposedly ‘low’ culture. Finding courses and postgraduate supervisors, securing funding for research, having conference papers received with interest and discussing projects with colleagues can all be challenging. Furthermore, the tendency of research into culture to be interdisciplinary creates further challenge, in that students are required to know and cite scholarship across a wider range of areas than they might have encountered prior to undertaking their projects. Traditional school and department structures at universities can make this difficult.

This conference aims to bring together current post-graduate students conducting research within the areas of screen and media studies and popular culture, giving them the opportunity to present and discuss their research with their peers. The conference will facilitate the exchange of ideas across disciplines, enable post-graduate students to gain experience presenting at a conference and allow students to make contacts with peers who are likely to be their academic colleagues in the future. The conference also aims to show that topics which are considered by some to be beneath scholarship can be studied rigorously and can contribute to academia.

Papers will be 20 minutes in length. Proposals are invited from postgraduate and undergraduate students only. Topics may include but are certainly not limited to:

• All aspects of film, television and other screen studies (e.g. games and gaming) 
• All aspects of media studies
• Fandom 
• Online fame 
• Cult franchises, e.g. MCU 
• Inter-display studies involving traditional academia and popular culture, e.g. historical fiction on TV 
• Marketing aesthetics 
• Meta-studies about the study of ‘low’ culture itself

Please send 300-word abstracts and a short biographical note to Emma Buchanan, (rspa98@bangor.ac.uk) by 1st February 2019.