*CFP* "THE AESTHETICS OF CREATIVE ACTIVISM", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM

As both a field of study and form of practice, creative activism seeks to understand how artistic forms can serve the ends of activist interventions.

 

To date, most emphasis has been on the activism component, drawing on theories of social movement formation, participatory action, and community organising. While there has been passing mention of aesthetics (relying heavily upon Rancière) the ‘creative’ term in creative activism remains woefully undertheorized. There are some scholars who have asked important questions about affect and effect, but overall, creative activism is ripe for deeper research into and theorisation of its aesthetic forms. Key questions include how creative activism differs from other activism, what makes it creative, and how (whether) the artistic components function effectively to achieve or enhance social change.

The Editors welcome submissions on any philosophically informed exploration of artistic forms as activist interventions, including, but not limited to:

• Ethics and morality in and of artistic activism

*CFP* "IDENTITY AND OTHERNESS IN FILM", INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON FILM STUDIES

Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, cinema, television, and related media have become increasingly central both to individual lives and to the lives of peoples, groups, and nations. Cinema has become a major form of cultural expression and films both reflect and influence the attitudes and behaviour of people, representing their tensions and anxieties, hopes and desires and incarnating social and cultural determinants of the era in which they were made.

Cinema as a whole has historically offered a rich setting for understanding cultural interaction, however it functions within certain political and ideological limits. It offers fascinating source material for an examination of what, in the modern world, we understand as "otherness", the cinematic "Other" being constructed in terms of race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender or sexual orientation.

This conference aims to consider film studies from a variety of critical, theoretical, and analytical approaches and to focus on how "self-other" relations are represented.

Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

*CFP* "CINEMATIC BOND AT 60: NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES", A HISTORY RESEARCH GROUP SYMPOSIUM

Cinematic Bond at 60: National and International Perspectives

A History Research Group Symposium

Bournemouth University (Online), 4 March 2022

 

In 1962 the first James Bond film, Dr No (Terence Young) was released. The film was a huge financial success for EON productions, catapulted Sean Connery to lifelong stardom and started a period of Bondmania that lasted for most of the 1960s. As a cultural icon and cultural phenomenon, James Bond and the Bond film have become a globally recognised brand. 

The films have been widely analysed for their spectacle, their often problematic engagement with masculinity, gender relations and cultural appropriation as well as the ideological implications of how they engage with their backdrop of social and geopolitical change across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With 2022 marking 60 years of the cinematic Bond and the latest instalment, No Time to Die (Cary Fukunaga), due (allegedly) for release in October 2021, critical reflections on this ongoing franchise are relevant and timely.

*CFP* "BORDERS AND DETECTIVE FICTION", THEME ISSUE, CLUES: A JOURNAL OF DETECTION

For this theme issue of Clues, proposals are sought from a wide variety of critical, national, and cultural perspectives addressing how and why borders are represented in detective fiction, film, television, or other media (e.g., computer games, graphic novels, radio drama, podcasts). As David Newman and Anssi Paasi argue, “The construction of boundaries at all scales and dimensions takes place through narrativity.” Thus, it makes sense to turn to the detective story, a genre whose plots conceptualize issues of morality, legality, security, and transgression to understand the ways in which borders are conceptualized and mediated. Crossing borders can signify openness, mobility, cultural exchange, and cooperation. But the border can also be a site of surveillance, discipline, risk, exclusion, and violence, a place where geographic, cultural, economic, and bodily integrity are rendered vulnerable. It can, in short, be the scene of (the) crime. How do imaginative narratives across the diverse range of historical and contemporary crime fiction constitute investigations of defined, dynamic, and/or developing border spaces?

Suggested topics:

• Detective fiction and migrancy/refugees 

*CFP* CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR TOPICAL ISSUES, OPEN CULTURAL STUDIES

Open Cultural Studies invites groups of researchers, conference organizers and individual scholars to submit their proposals of edited volumes to be considered for publication as topical issues of the journal. 

 

About the journal: 

Open Cultural Studies is a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal that explores the fields of Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts. It interprets culture in an inclusive sense, in different theoretical, geographical and historical contexts. The journal would like to promote new research perspectives in cultural studies, but it also seeks to map out social and political scholarship that places questions of inequalities and imbalances of power at the heart of academic debate. 

 

Published special/Topical issues: 

*CFP* "DIGITAL PEDAGOGIES POST-COVID-19", SPECIAL ISSUE, CONVERGENCE JOURNAL

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced academe to rethink the role digital and internet technologies play in and with the pedagogical process. For better or worse, the internet as institution has disrupted classical and traditional notions of learning. As evidenced by the pandemic, we are all falling behind in this paradigmatic shift in pedagogical understanding and approach. According to some (Ulmer, 2003; Serres, 2015; Hayles, 2007), the exigency of such a reconsideration arrives as utterly overdue. While the otherwise future of online learning has already arrived, COVID-19 has demonstrated that we are still yet living in the past.

Understanding our era as an apparatus or paradigm (Ulmer 1998)—at least with regard to digital technologies in general, the internet in particular—we must give attention to emerging patterns of activity, belief, logic, and even neurology. While some theorists have warned about the danger of digital technologies causing disorientation (Stiegler, 2008), the soul at work (Berardi, 2009), violence (Virilio, 1986), or general detriment (Carr, 2010), we should be reminded of the concept of appropriation, as given by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, 1987). Digital technologies are what we make of them, and this includes digital pedagogy. Digital pedagogy thus again returns us to the /pharmakon/: a poison, or a cure—or both. As such, the aim of education is to remedy the influence of digital media and immunize us against it, even if by way of digital education.

*CFP* "TROPICAL LANDSCAPES: NATURE-CULTURE ENTANGLEMENTS", SPECIAL ISSUE, ETROPIC: ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF STUDIES IN THE TROPICS

Landscape integrates both natural and cultural aspects of a particular area. Landscapes incorporate environmental elements including landforms, waterscapes, climate and weather, flora and fauna. They also necessarily involve human perception and inscriptions which reflect histories of extraction and excavation, of planting and settlement, of design and pollution. Natural elements and the cultural shaping by humans – past, present and future – means landscapes reflect living entanglements of people and place.

A landscape’s physicality is entwined with layers of human meaning and value – and tropical landscapes have a particular human value. The tropics is commonly defined in geographical terms as the region of Earth on either side of the Equator extending to the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Yet the tropics is far more than geographical and needs to be understood through the imaginary of tropicality. Tropicality refers to how the tropics are construed as the exoticised environmental Other of the Western world as this is informed by art and culture, and imperial and scientific practices. In this imaginary – in which the tropics are depicted through nature images as either fecund paradise or fetid hell – the temperate is portrayed as civilised and the tropical as requiring cultivation.

*CFP* "COSTUME AND FAIRY TALES", SPECIAL ISSUE, STUDIES IN COSTUME & PERFORMANCE JOURNAL

Costume plays an important part both in traditional fairy tales and in their adaptations in diverse media forms, especially in performing arts such as theatre, ballet, opera, and musical, but also in other media such as film, visual art, manga, theme parks, video games, and digital and social media. Clothes worn by characters in fairy tales function according to the internal narrative logic that constitutes and organizes the story-world, defining and transforming the wearers’ identities and social contexts. In this sense, fairy-tale clothes can be regarded as costume, defined as the kind of clothes that bear significance, within a staged, performed moment for an audience, ranging from traditional theatre to live art, through spoken, movement based, or sung performance. The ubiquitous persistence of fairy tales in popular cultures across the globe renders them a means to express social, cultural and psychological anxieties, evoking ethical dimensions of individual and collective struggles. As such, the way characters are embodied through their clothes bears significant narrative and performative potential in layering of meanings in performance making.

Equally, iconic fairy tale characters may float away from their narrative roles and be found to be expressing key themes in contemporary performance-based artistic practices. For example, Korean-born photographer Chan-Hyo Bae in his Existing in Costume series (2006-) casts himself in the roles of princesses in European fairy tales such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty by wearing authentic dresses worn by ruling-class women in eighteenth-century England, thereby foregrounding the physical and metaphorical tension between the male Asian body and those kinds of historical costumes which evidence the Eurocentric colonial norms still dominant in today’s globalized culture.

*CFP* "MEDIATING MOTHER-ACTIVISM", BOOK CHAPTER

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in exploring motherhood and mothering as political and emotional resources for digital activism. Although the intertwinement of mothering and politics predates the digital context, feminist debates around the politicization of mothering, from protests against state killings and disappearances, via the role of the mother in nation-building, to advocacy for right wing populisms, need addressing all the more urgently as we endeavour to understand the ways in which mothering is not only mediatised, but agentively deployed across social media platforms. The political role and significance of the mother, the uneasy relation between motherhood as gendered identity and mothering as daily practice, continue to be contentious issues for feminists (Rich 1976, DiQuinzio 1999, Gumbs, Martens and Williams 2016, Naber 2021). Mother-activists have historically constructed public issues from their personal experiences of suffering and loss within family structures (Reiger 2000), utilizing the symbolic power of motherhood in order to motivate others to join their causes (Logsdon Conradsen 2011). Notwithstanding, campaigns such those of the Argentinian Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have been cast as ‘trapped by a bad script’ (Taylor 1997), that is as reproducing the same narratives of familialism and heteropatriarchal bloodline that underpin the narrative of the state. Conversely, many feminist scholars have argued that the political mobilisation of the trope of the mother has the potential to challenge the ‘official’ frameworks of national, ethnic or other group loyalty and to undermine or to radically reframe these very narratives (Kim 2020, Athanasiou 2017, Carreon and Moghadam 2015). For example, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have raised the slogan ‘One child, all the children’ (Sosa 2014), taking the campaign beyond limits of blood kinship.

*CFP* "BROADCASTING IN (DE)COLONIAL SETTINGS", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE JOURNAL OF RADIO & AUDIO MEDIA

The emergence of radio introduced profound changes in public communication, changing patterns of information dissemination at local, national and international levels. In the case of the Imperial nations this role was extended overseas with radio becoming the most important medium for uniting the home countries with the expats living in the far reaches of the empires, though not unproblematically.

A growing body of literature on the history of imperial and colonial broadcasting, as well as of sound, have been contributing to the understanding of the role of radio technologies, broadcasting and music in the 20th century in forging audible and sonorous empires. However, the ways in which different imperial countries used radio to create a sense of nation and colonial identities among those living in different geographies remains an open question. On the other hand, in the last decades works dealing with the media during decolonization have called attention to the significant role played by the audio medium in promoting independence from colonial powers and giving visibility to forms of culture that would become part of national identities of the new-born countries. What research has also revealed is that much is still to be understood about the relation between radio and decolonization practices and processes. Thus, this special issue seeks to publish manuscripts dealing with how broadcasting was incorporated and appropriated within different colonial and decolonial settings.

Hence, papers dealing with the following topics will be highly appreciated (non-exhaustive list):

*CFP* CALL FOR PARTICIPATION, POLITICAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION MEDIA AND POLITICS GROUP ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Political Studies Association Media and Politics Group Annual Conference

Centre for Research on Communities and Cultures

Canterbury Christ Church University

15-16 December 2021

This conference will facilitate a space for thinking critically about the concept of communities and how it is used in political discourse and political communication in the digital and (post)pandemic context. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Political discourses about and by communities

*CFP* "INCLUSIVE MEDIA EDUCATION FOR DIVERSE SOCIETIES", HYBRID WORKSHOP

 Inclusive Media Education for Diverse Societies

University of Groningen (Netherlands)

11 & 12 November 2021

 

 

This hybrid workshop aims to bring together papers that develop a critical perspective and focus on issues related to media literacy education, differences and diversity. We aim to include conceptual papers as well as empirical studies from different contexts that provide a critical reflection of existing media education practices.

The papers can focus on the following topics among others:

• Media literacy education for intercultural dialogue;

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

Mediating Arctic Geographies: Contemporary Imaginaries of the Circumpolar World

Inari, Finland

24-26 January 2022

 

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* "AMIGO-ENEMIGO. LAS FRANJAS INVISIBLES DEL ESPACIO POLÍTICO", II COLOQUIO INTERNACIONAL PALIMPSESTOS PERSPECTIVAS CRÍTICAS DEL NORTE DE MÉXICO

II Coloquio Internacional Palimpsestos Perspectivas Críticas del Norte de México

Amigo - Enemigo. Las franjas invisibles del espacio político

Del 28 al 30 de octubre (coloquio en formato híbrido)

 

La Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua, la Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo (MÉXICO), la Universidad de Playa Ancha, Valparaíso (CHILE) y el Centro de Investigación Iberoamericano de Maguncia-Germersheim /Leipzig (CIIA, Alemania) celebran este coloquio del 28 al 30 de octubre de 2021 en Chihuahua (México).

Ejes temáticos:

• Significaciones desde lo local y lo global: Visitaciones/Revisitaciones al norte mexicano: exotismos y postexotismos

*CFP* "AND YET IT MOVES! ON CINEMA, MEDIA, AND MOBILITY", XXVIII INTERNATIONAL FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES CONFERENCE

And Yet It Moves! On Cinema, Media, and Mobility

XXVIII International Film and Media Studies Conference

November 2nd–5th 2021

On-line/Udine – Gorizia (IT)

 

The covid pandemic has dramatically revealed the high level of mobility in our contemporary society by, paradoxically, reducing human movement to almost zero, even if images, data, news, financial flows, material goods, and the virus itself have continued to circulate at full speed around the globe. The pandemic has provoked new configurations of the media system, pushing media adaptability and pervasiveness into unexpected scenarios, and accelerating technological and socio-cultural processes already underway (Keidl, Melamed, Hediger and Somaini 2021). As we seem to slowly regain our mobility, it seems fitting to reflect at large on the role historically played by cinema and media in shaping movement and space. 

*CFP* "MEMORY, TRAUMA AND RECOVERY", INTERNATIONAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE (ONLINE)

Memory, Trauma and Recovery

International Interdisciplinary Conference (Online)

16-17 September 2021

 

To remember means sometimes: to experience again. That is the case of trauma. However, recovery from trauma is also based on memory. So the question is not how to forget about bad memories, but how to remember and not suffer. During this conference we would like to concentrate on the phenomena of trauma and recovery, to look at how memory is involved in the traumatic experience and the recovery process and explore among other questions what we remember and forget, what causes suffering and how to deal with it.

We are interested in all aspects of traumatic experiences, in their individual and collective dimensions, in the past and in the present-day world. We would like to examine the role of memory in both falling into trauma and overcoming it. 

*CFP* CALL FOR ARTICLES, VOL. 14, Nº 1, JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA RESEARCH

The Journal of Communication and Media Research is a research-based and peer-reviewed journal published twice-yearly in the months of April and October by the Association of Media and Communication Researchers of Nigeria (CAC/IT/NO 111018). The journal is addressed to the African and international academic community and it accepts articles from all scholars, irrespective of country or institution of affiliation.

The focus of the Journal of Communication and Media Research is research, with a bias for quantitative and qualitative studies that use any or a combination of the acceptable methods of research. These include Surveys, Content Analysis, and Experiments for quantitative studies; and Observation, Interviews/Focus Groups, and Documentary Analysis for qualitative studies. The journal seeks to contribute to the body of knowledge in the field of communication and media studies and welcomes articles in all areas of communication and the media including, but not limited to, mass communication, mass media channels, traditional communication, organizational communication, interpersonal communication, development communication, public relations, advertising, information communication technologies, the Internet and computer-mediated communication.

*CFP* "POSTHUMANISM AT THE MARGINS: ON FILM, MEDIA, AND NEW WAYS OF BEING", SPECIAL ISSUE, SYNOPTIQUE: JOURNAL OF MOVING IMAGE STUDIES

The term posthumanism has, throughout its relatively short lifespan, swelled to encompass any number of definitions and permutations, ranging from a descriptor for a technological afterlife of the “human” to a critical look at ways of being within a wider ecology. The immediate quandary that any scholar of the posthuman faces is the wrangling of a proper definition for such an expansive yet timely topic. It is precisely this ambiguity that we hope to engage with in this issue of Synoptique, as the amorphous idea of the posthuman offers us the chance to re-examine the “human.”

Traditionally, posthumanism has remained “committed to a specific order of rationality, one rooted in the epistemological locus of the West” (Jackson 2013, 671). By building upon such legacies of radical perspectives that decentre traditional Western humanist paradigms, such as deanthropocentrism, decoloniality, feminist, and Queer lenses, we aim to place posthumanism in conversation with film and media studies, with the goal of highlighting the historically marginalized perspectives central to this intersection. We believe that film and other new media are uniquely situated to address these sets of questions due to the breadth of disciplines they intersect with, as well as their positions between the technological and the cultural. We invite submissions to consider how different forms of media may challenge, transform, and transcend traditional paradigms of the posthuman; we especially invite submissions of alternative media such as video essays, zines, or other art pieces.

*CFP* "TEACHING (WITH) POPULAR MUSIC", SPECIAL ISSUE, TEACHING MEDIA QUARTERLY

Teaching Media Quarterly is happy to share the latest call for lesson plan submissions on “Teaching (with) Popular Music" with you and please share widely!

“We both had to admit that popular songs really had no academic significance.” This is what Ray B. Browne was told upon being rejected from a journal in the first issue of Popular Music and Society fifty years ago. This prejudice still exists in the academy and has been perpetuated in the curriculums across a number of disciplines. However, with plenty of academic monographs and a good amount of dedicated peer-reviewed journals today, popular music is now a prolific field for critical and interdisciplinary inquiries. 

Popular music scholarship explores musical (sub)cultures, music in visual and digital media, music as propaganda, music as activism, and more. Thus, music is a ripe avenue through which media scholars contend with issues of power, identity, nationalism, environmentalism, (de)coloniality, globalization, and social justice. For media instructors, then, teaching a critical perspective on popular music can address many of the multisensory and transdisciplinary dimensions of media literacy.

*CFP* "POLITICAL IMAGINATION: RETHINKING OUR VOCABULARY", LEXICAL WORKSHOP

Political Imagination: Rethinking Our Vocabulary Lexical Workshop

Minerva Humanities Center, Tel Aviv University

September 29 & 30, 2021

 

 

Political imagination is a concept that can be traced to a 200- year tradition of political thought and has returned to the public discourse in recent years in the context of theoretical artistic and activist conversations. In this workshop we seek to join this conversation by developing lexical concepts to explore Political Imagination and Imagination as Politics. Theories of decolonization, environmental justice discourses and activist groups around the world as Extinction Rebellion, Standing Rock, the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter use a political imagination rhetoric not only to criticize, challenge and oppose political realities but also to offer alternatives for them. At the same time, artists, writers and filmmakers are producing more and more cultural artifacts that engage with questions of futurism, alternative pasts, dystopias and imaginaries.