*CFP* "VFX AND FANS: PARTICIPATORY CULTURE AND THE INDUSTRY", SPECIAL ISSUE, KINEPHANOS JOURNAL

Interactions between creators from the entertainment industry and the fan community have been around for a long time. In 1891, Holmes fans reacted very strongly to the famous detective death. It resulted in a flood of angry letters sent to author Conan Doyle, who resurrected him in a subsequent episode. Even the Hollywood star system was first motivated by the fans’ desire to know their favorite actors appearing as anonymous shadows on the screen. Later on, communities gathered around sci-fi magazines such as Hugo Gernsbach's Amazing Stories in 1926. It was a decisive moment that saw the birth of "fandom" as we know it today, and it certainly contributed to the emergence of audiences known as "cultists", a term coined by Matt Hills (2002), which is a type of public that is increasingly knowledgeable, who feels a certain "empowerment" towards fetishized works. 

The end of the 20th century, with the development and democratization of digital technologies, has witnessed the rise of this new consumer-producer paradigm that thumbs its nose at the ideology of the Frankfurt School's passive consumer. Without forgetting that the modern fan is the product of a long line of popular works and "B-movies", from Flash Gordon (1936) to the science fiction films of the 1940s and 1950s in the United States (with the rise of communism and its alien invasion films), from Star Trek in the 60s to Star Wars in 70s - a wave on which the franchise is still "surfing". Special effects films, a cinema of attraction that traditionally places "the effect" at the center (Gunning), have always fascinated the public, but always from a distance without being able to really interact with them or create or propose their alternative versions. The only interventions possible were, until now, centered on "a posteriori" actions, via journal sections of readers' letters, for example, or web forums, without much impact on the result.

*CFP* "SHOWING THEORY TO KNOW THEORY: UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL SCIENCE CONCEPTS THROUGH ILLUSTRATIVE VIGNETTES", CATALOGUE E-CAMPUS ONTARIO

Funded by e-Campus Ontario, this collaborative, open educational resource (OER) will bring together a collection of 100+ short pedagogical pieces (500-1000 words) to help new learners understand complex theoretical concepts and disciplinary jargon from the critical social sciences. Each entry takes the form of an “illustrative vignette”—a short, evocative story, visual or infographic, poem, described photograph, or other audio-visual material. This OER will be of use across disciplines and community contexts, democratizing theory while linking it to practical, grounded experience. 

 

This FOLLOW-UP to our initial CFP is to gather submissions that address one of the remaining available terms in our catalogue. Please consult the online spreadsheet to select an available concept/term. Then email your Expression of Interest to the editors (contacts below), confirming the your selection AND the illustrative example that you would like to use. We will get back to you with any feedback. To create your vignette, follow the template attached to this CFP. Two sample vignettes are also included to provide examples of style, tone, and structure.

You may create your vignette as an expository text, story or narrative, illustration or infographic, poem, described photograph, or other audio-visual material.

*CFP* CALL FOR PARTICIPATION, I INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE VISUAL MOTIFS OF POWER AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

I International Conference Visual Motifs of Power and the Public Sphere

Universidad Pompeu Fabra

20 & 21 September, 2021

 

 

There is a significant tradition of studies on political iconography inspired by the central figure of Aby Warburg, which is continued on through Erwin Panofsky, Horst Bredekamp, Monica Centanni, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Patrick Boucheron, as well as the aforementioned Carlo Ginzburg. His emphasis on the central role played by visual motifs in the construction of public space converges with the investigations carried out by a large number of theorists from other fields, such as theory and art criticism (Boris Groys, Hito Steyerl, Harun Farocki), political philosophy (Giorgio Agamben), film studies (Nicole Brenez, Alain Bergala, Emmanuelle André), photography theory (Ariella Azoulay), social semiotics (Theo van Leeuwen), cognitive iconology (Ian Verstegen) and production studies (Banks, Caldwell, Du Guy, Thompson, and Burns), all of which pay attention to the levels of awareness and control over the images produced, whether in film and photojournalism, in the praxis of TV documentaries and reports or in online productions.

*CFP* CALL FOR ARTICLES, 2021 ISSUES, TRANSLATION REVIEW JOURNAL

The editors of Translation Review are inviting submissions:

• translations of contemporary international writers into English 
• submissions that discuss the process and practical problems of translating, including the reconstruction of the translation process. 
• interviews with translators 
• manuscritps that address the concept of translation in the visual and musical arts 
• translation in the digital age

 

Guidelines 

Please note that all scholarly manuscripts should follow the Chicago Manual of Style EB (endnotes and bibliography).

*CFP* "SOUNDS OF MIGRATION", 2021 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

"Sounds of Migration" 2021 Annual Conference

Pennsylvania State University (hybrid or virtual conference format – TBD)

November 4-6, 2021

 

The growing flow and circulation of migrants and refugees across the world introduces unfamiliar voices and sounds into new environments. This conference will examine the diverse expressions and echoes of what we call the sounds of migration. Drawing from Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) definition of technoscapes, we conceptualize “the sounds of migration” as encapsulating the fluid nature of sounds, bodies, and cultural elements coming together to construct imagined worlds, as seen in a globalized space. We invite a broad range of submissions that explore various aspects of the oral and aural dynamics related to migrations, displacements, refugees, and diasporas. How do minority voices emerge? What impact do experiences of migration have on everyday life, both from those relocating and the receiving society? How is literature, language, music, and/or other forms of culture and artistic expression created? How do languages in contact influence each other and lead to changes in pronunciation, word formation or sentence structure?

*CFP* "CRISIS / REPRESENTING, ENDURING, PROVOKING", 1ST ISSUE, IN VIVO JOURNAL

In Vivo is a bilingual online platform (French and English) specialized in multidisciplinary research on contemporary artistic creation, with an (almost) exclusive preoccupation with Performing Arts (theatre, choreography and dance, circus, performance art, opera) and Cinema.

Given the hybridity of contemporary artistic forms, In Vivo intends to host reflections on the written arts (literature, comics, biographies, etc.) and non-cinematic visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, installations, etc.) notably in their imbrication with the performing scenes and screens.

In Vivo contains 5 clusters, differentiated according to the methodology and the field of expertise to which they are respectively attached: Aesthetic(s), Philo-Performance(s), Humanities, Queerness, Pluralities.

In addition, a special section called Dialogue(s) is exclusively dedicated to interviews with scholars, artists, and practitioners of the Performing Arts and Cinema.

*CFP* "CREATIVITY AND INNOVATIONS IN THEATRE, MEDIA AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION: VISIONS AND VALUES FOR THE FUTURE", CONFERENCE

 "Creativity and Innovations in Theatre, Media and Cultural Production: Visions and Values for the Future"

The Faculty Of Dramatic Arts (Belgrade)

17-19 November 2021

The deadline for submitting proposals is June 30 2021. Please fill the online form for the paper presentations and panel sessions available at this link

 

Conference topics include, but are not limited to:

- Cultural management and policy:

• New organizational models in the field of culture

*CFP* "MACHINE VISION IN CONTEXT: POLITICS AND PRACTICES OF COMPUTATIONAL SEEING", SPECIAL ISSUE, PHOTOGRAPHIES JOURNAL

This special issue will bring together interdisciplinary scholarship that engages critically with the evolving, recursive interrelations between machine vision and photography.

The heightened capacities of machines to ‘see’ and visually categorize the world have been the subject of numerous recent journalistic exposés and public outcry. Whether critiquing the role that machine vision plays in efforts to track, detain, and penalize targeted communities, or charting the incorporation of similar technologies into urban infrastructures, self-driving cars and ‘smart’ appliances, there is a growing awareness that it is reshaping what is seen and what counts as seeing. Online, recognition algorithms increasingly automate the tasks of tagging, categorizing and extracting meaning from the “unmanageable and unassimilable” accumulation of images circulating across networked environments (Henning 2018). Within this context of volume, scale, and distributed production, the photographic image appears to have receded from the realm of human perception (Zylinska 2017), working instead as an ‘operative’ agent (Hoelzl & Marie 2015) that drives and draws together the constellation of hard and soft platforms that comprise the contemporary mediascape (Dvořák and Parikka 2021; Mackenzie & Munster 2019). Images and their audiences are being ‘put to work,’ as the solicitation and generation of metadata as well as the non-human recognition of pixel- and user-based patterns facilitates the improvement and expansion of computerized vision (Sluis 2020).

*CFP* "VISUALIZING CLIMATE CRISIS", NEW ISSUE, VISUAL STUDIES JOURNAL

Visual Studies Journal in collaboration Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool invite thematic and illustrated essays in traditional format (6-8,000 words) that critically and conceptually examine how we come to see, understand, and respond to climate crisis. 

By foregrounding the visual as an optic to better understand and examine these pertinent and timely issues, we welcome proposals that examine:

• How artists, activists, communities, and institutions deploy the use of photography and visual culture as a way of understanding the past, present and future impacts on communities, audiences, and people around the globe.
• Specific works of art and art practices that either historically or contemporaneously explore issues of climate crisis.
• Critique the role and relationship between galleries, museums, institutions and issues of climate crisis, advocacy, and education.
• Climate migrancy, the history of land and water management, food, and agricultural processes and/or the impact of food, clothing, and electrical consumption in relation to climate crisis.
• Food, biodiversity, recycling, land and water use, climate and race justice, architecture, non-human animals, and alternative energy sources as issues related to the climate crisis, either negatively or positively.

*CFP* "DOCUMENTARY FILM IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN: THEORY AND PRACTICE", EDITED VOLUME

This interdisciplinary edited volume seeks to illuminate theoretical and practical perspectives on the production, reception, and analysis of ethnographic and documentary film in Latin America and the Caribbean. We invite scholars, critics, filmmakers, and other interested authors to submit proposals as outlined below.

While there is a substantial and growing literature on narrative films of the global south, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the theoretical and practical issues of making, producing, distributing, and watching documentary and ethnographic films within the region. Such work is long overdue given the increasing number of high-quality documentary and ethnographic films that continue to emerge from and about Latin America, the Caribbean, and its myriad diasporas. Therefore, this edited volume represents an important step toward thinking about issues relevant to the production and analysis of documentary and ethnographic film across the global south.

Topics for essays could include but are not limited to considerations of

• a film or group of films 
• the work of a filmmaker or group of filmmakers 

*CFP* "MEDIATING ARCTIC GEOGRAPHIES: CONTEMPORARY IMAGINARIES OF THE CIRCUMPOLAR WORLD", INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Mediating Arctic Geographies: Contemporary Imaginaries of the Circumpolar World

Inari, Finland, 11-12 August 2021

Tampere University

 

Since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the Arctic (understood here as the circumpolar region around and north of the Arctic Circle) has entered worldwide public discussion to an unprecedented extent. As a global climate archive and the site of various scrambles for resources, it has become the centre of attention within debates on climate change and global geopolitics. The international stir created by the planting of a Russian flag under the Arctic sea ice in 2007 and a Chinese flag at the North Pole in 2012, the politicisation of the recovery of the two shipwrecks from John Franklin’s disastrous 1845 expedition in 2014 and 2016, and Donald Trump’s controversial overturning of Barack Obama’s ban on oil drilling in the Arctic are spectacular examples of this new hypervisibility of the Arctic in international politics and global media.

*CFP* "DIGITAL MATTERS: DESIGNING/PERFORMING AGENCY FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE", 25TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE DRHA

Digital Matters: Designing/Performing Agency for the Anthropocene

25th annual conference of the DRHA (Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts)

Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, 5-7.09.2021.

 

The Anthropocene highlights a fundamental fracture in contemporary culture between what we know and how we act. In the public sphere, this contradiction can be summarized by the overwhelming sense of apathy in the face of growing complexity and crisis. In scholarship the Anthropocene has been tied up with the experience of the unthinkable – by thinkers including Timothy Morton, Donna Haraway, and Amitav Ghosh. Yet, the current COVID-19 pandemic —which as a crisis also exemplifies the human impact on and a reshaping of environments—challenges the pervasiveness of the key concepts of abstraction and unthinkability.

*CFP* "A THERAPY OF THINGS? MATERIALITY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS IN LITERATURE AND THE VISUAL ARTS", WORKSHOP

A Therapy of Things? Materiality and Psychoanalysis in Literature and the Visual Arts

Workshop at the Department of German Studies/English and American Studies, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

03.12.2021 & 10.12.2021 (online)

 

Psychoanalysis has a long, if sometimes troubled, history of being literary theory’s ally and accomplice (Felman). In the wake, however, of work in new materialism, literary theory and criticism have recently tried to move beyond such constants as ‘the symbolic’ or ‘the human subject’ (Clarke and Rossini; Herman). These constants – or so the story goes – are precisely the staples of psychoanalysis, thus apparently making psychoanalysis vulnerable to the new materialist critique of being blindly centered and premised on the human subject: compare Bruno Latour’s remark about how “the very violence” with which the Moderns “strip invisible beings of all external existence and insist on locating them only in the twists and turns of the self, the unconscious, or the neurons” reveals “a deep discomfort,” an “intense anxiety” (185). Can we approach psychoanalysis in such a way that it does contribute to a non-anthropocentric approach to literature, after all? And can we, for this purpose, rethink some of the key terms and ideas of psychoanalysis in their material dimension?

*CFP* CALL FOR PARTICIPATION, CANCEL CULTURE AND CHARACTER ASSASSINATION VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

Cancel Culture and Character Assassination Conference

Virtual

September 24-26, 2021

 

While character assassination has taken a variety of forms throughout history, a particularly current and controversial practice of social ostracism has bred "cancel culture." Cancel culture refers to when a person, typically a public figure, is expelled from their social or professional circles as a result of offensive behavior, real or alleged. The expression is mostly used by those who feel they are being unfairly punished for minor transgressions. As a form of public shaming, those who are "canceled" may be scapegoated or stigmatized and exposed to the judgment and bullying of the public. Canceled individuals may, in perception or reality, find themselves silenced and unable to speak on their own behalf. While cancel culture is often linked to the rise of social media, practices of silencing and social exclusion have many historical antecedents, ranging from public scapegoating rituals to rebellious mobs tearing down the statues of disgraced individuals.

*CFP* "MEDIA, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND PROTEST CULTURES IN AFRICA", BOOK PROJECT

Social movements are not a new phenomenon in African societies. These social movements, as is the global trend, have used and continue to use different strategies and media such as blogs, social media, underground newspapers and radio, posters, t-shirts, street theatre, art, mural, music and street posters and pamphlets to send their messages across (see Lee and Chan 2011; Willems 2011). It is social and other popular political movements that are credited with bringing about different types of revolutions and change especially during colonial times leading to independence (Taylor 1997). The liberation and accompanying social movements in Africa are peculiar and different from all others across the globe: they were born as protests and resistance to colonial oppression. They may share the same characteristics with others in that they started off being led organically from the bottom by ordinary people in a quest to change the trajectory of their lives. These movements faced different challenges in spreading their messages as the colonial governments used the press for control, suppression and assimilation in the case of the French. The British, according to Nyamnjoh (2005) were a bit liberal in allowing black cultural (and yet not critical) content in some of the publications. They used different media such as missionary newspapers sympathetic to the black people’s cause as was the case in West Africa (Nyamnjoh 2005), underground radio and newspapers in Rhodesia and South Africa (Kirk 1975; Smith 2013). Nnamdi Azikiwe’s newspaper in Nigeria is credited with bringing up a culture of black protest in in the mid-20^th century. His newspaper gave space for disruptive articulations of independence to the black educated elite most of whom returning home from the west where they had acquired an education.

*CFP* "HUMOR, THE ABSURD, AND THE ABJECT IN MIDDLE EASTERN AND NORTH AFRICAN CULTURAL PRODUCTION", SPECIAL ISSUE, CLCWEB: COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND CULTURE

From the films of Elia Suleiman to the cartoons of Ali Ferzat, humor and the absurd have long permeated the landscape of literary and cultural production across the Middle East and North Africa. Writers, artists, and intellectuals have employed an aesthetics of humor in a myriad of forms- from lampooning caricatures and songs, to a cinema of the absurd and satirical theater. While some of the recent scholarship in Middle East humor studies has focused on the role of humor and satire in the Arab uprisings and other mass protest movements as well as the lampooning of contemporary Islamist extremists as forms of resistance, this special issue will focus on new scholarship on the relationships between humor, the absurd, and the abject in works of literature, music, and visual culture.

Our aim is to bring together scholars who are focusing on 20th and 21st cultural production in the region and who are working on one or more of the following questions: How and why do particular forms of literature, music, and visual culture articulate the imbrication between the humorous and the tragic through the figure of abject or by evoking tropes of abjection? In what ways do specific cultural producers mediate the tension between the abject and the absurd to comment on history and specific historical events? How can such commentaries be read both within and beyond frames of resistance, subversion, and the carnivalesque for those who are, in Kundera’s words "far from power?” How and to what effect do artists employ an aesthetics of humor? 

*CFP* "CULTURAL INTERTEXTS", VOL. 11/2021, JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND CULTURE STUDIES

We hereby invite proposals of original articles related to the general theme of Cultural Intertexts, an academic journal of Literature and Cultural Studies, ISSN 2393-0624, E-ISSN 2393-1078.

The editors will consider for publication papers which tackle strategies of representation and of (inter)textual construction emerging from the dialogic relation between:

• literature and the historical and cultural context of text production; 
• distribution and consumption; 
• literature and other arts (music, film, visual arts, etc.) or sciences (linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology, history, sociology and political sciences, internet and new technologies, etc.); 
• creation and creator (autobiographic elements, metafictions, etc.).

 

Deadline for proposal (title, abstract and five keywords): 30 April 2021

*CFP* "DOCUMENTARY FILM IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH: THEORY AND PRACTICE", BOOK CHAPTER

This interdisciplinary edited volume seeks to illuminate theoretical and practical perspectives on the production, reception, and analysis of ethnographic and documentary film across the global south (broadly conceived). We invite scholars, critics, filmmakers, and other interested authors to submit proposals as outlined below. The volume is somewhat centered on the uses of music/sound within ethnographic and documentary film, though proposals unrelated to this topic are indeed welcome.

While there is a substantial and growing literature on narrative films of the global south, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the theoretical and practical issues of making, producing, distributing, and watching documentary and ethnographic films within the region. Such work is long overdue given the increasing number of high-quality documentary and ethnographic films that continue to emerge from and about the region and its myriad diasporas. Therefore, this edited volume represents an important step toward thinking about issues relevant to the production and analysis of documentary and ethnographic film across the global south.

Topics for essays could include, but are not limited to, considerations of

*CFP* "LGBT+ VISUAL ARTS AND POLITICS IN ROMANIAN CINEMA", SPECIAL ISSUE, EAST EUROPEAN FILM BULLETIN

With a penal code (article 200) inherited from the Ceausescu regime, which criminalized same-sex relationships, and which was only repealed in 2001 as a way for the country to enter the European Union, Romania remains a largely traditional society regarding LGBT+ rights. However, customs and mores are slowly changing thanks to political, legal as well as artistic fights. Audiovisual art has substantially contributed to this change. Films such as Mungiu's Beyond the Hills (2012) or Olteanu’s Several Conversations about a very Tall Girl (2018); installation and video art, pioneered by artists such as Sorin Oncu, are prime examples of Romania’s emerging queer art. Showing such films in Romania often causes quite a stir. Campillo’s 120 Beats Per Minute had one of its screenings interrupted by a Romanian Orthodox movement in Bucharest, exemplifying a divided society struggling with its communist past and the state of capitalist democracy. This also poses the question of what type of LGBT+ culture Romania can put at the forefront, whether through western European/American films, or domestic productions.

‘In an increasingly less tolerant context which led to the recent ban of gender studies in Romanian universities, such an issue is more than warranted.

*CFP* "REWORLDING", UPCOMING ISSUE, TBA: JOURNAL OF ART, MEDIA AND VISUAL CULTURE

tba is an annual peer-reviewed journal organized by graduate students of the Visual Arts Department at Western University in London, Ontario. It provides an interdisciplinary forum for emerging and independent artists and scholars by bringing together studio, art history, cultural studies, theory and criticism, gender studies, and related fields. It encourages experimentation and risk.

 

Reworlding

“A dark bewitched commitment to the lure of Progress (and its polar opposite) lashes us to endless infernal alternatives, as if we had no other ways to reworld, reimagine, relive, and reconnect with each other, in multispecies well-being. This explication does not excuse us from doing many important things better; quite the opposite.” 

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 51.